Light To Those In Misery
by Talik Sanis
Summary: A return to Canterlot inspires some existential questions in Ponyville's resident librarian, but the answers she finds may better serve the Goddesses of the Dayspring and the Nighttide. There are, of course, some conditions that ponies share with the divine.
1. Hidden Treasure

Disclaimer: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the intellectual property of DHX Media, Hasbro Studios, and Top Draw Animation as well as the various owners and producers involved in the creation of the series.

Fair warning, the first two chapters deal with Twilight's interaction with original characters. Canon characters take over completely after that.

Rated T for some disturbing, violent imagery in later chapters.

* * *

A procession of ponies marched out from the entryway of a cathedral emblazoned with the Stars and Moon symbol of the Princess of the Night. Its body was an obsidian square, but it was alive with intricate carvings and statues of The Princess of the Night and heroes of the faith that formed an ornate façade. Four cardinal spires jutted out from its top, reaching for stars unseen in the mid-day light, deadened though it was by encroaching clouds. A wide stairway led from its doorway to a dirt path and an open grassland beyond. The group traveled down.

Twilight Sparkle watched as they passed her by, standing out of their way, and then she joined behind them. She was led away, leaving the cathedral and the city's edge behind her. In moments, a fenced field stood before them, and the mass pushed through a narrow gateway flanked by guardpony statues. Each one was erect, using his upturned sword as a third leg, his forehooves on either side of the grip, on the guard or the cross. Their rigid faces and bodies were immaculate, but the walls they guarded crumbled around them. To Twilight, they looked so perfect that it seemed that there could never have been a time when they had not been as they were, but their terrifying perfection was youth; the walls simply had to be older. She continued on, head held low, staring at the rear hooves of the pony that walked ahead of her and following them. Trees, their leaves at various stages of yellowing and browning in the dwindling warmth and light of fall, lined the path after the gate. Passing the statues, Twilight saw their backs in her peripheral vision and knew that they were pegasi. They were identical, for concealing charms rendered all living guards unidentifiable, separating them into the two groups that were visible throughout Canterlot. There were only indistinguishable stallions, sharing the same face as the statues. Of course they would be pegasi, Twilight thought to herself. Despite her many years in Canterlot, she could count on her hooves the number of times she had seen an earth pony royal guard, let alone the statue of one. Earth ponies were regular soldiers, certainly, but the gold-armored royal guards were quite literally of a different breed.

There were some who claimed that the lack of earth pony guards was evidence that pegasi and unicorn mistreated earth ponies, their cousins. They maintained that earth ponies were both disadvantaged inferiors and the victims of exploitation at the hooves of their social superiors. Consider, they said, that the fastest earth pony could not match an average Pegasus, or that the strongest and hardiest could not compete with the mystic might of an adult unicorn. Political activists and philosophers, who were almost exclusively enfranchised unicorns themselves, had claimed for centuries that the natural maldistribution of power between the three races had developed over time into a form of social inequality.

Pegasi made up the majority of Canterlot's royal guards, and were, of course, the elite Wonderbolts, revered both as soldiers and performers. They were ever in positions of power or of excess. The unicorns were governors, socialites, scientists, poets, and philosophers. They were the greatest dreamers and the greatest scientific realists. Even more than the pegasi, they shaped the world and ruled it. Pegasi controlled the skies and the weather while unicorns lived in stars and dreams. Earth ponies were the farmers, the cleaners, the construction workers, and the miners, ever dependent on the unicorns for leadership and the pegasi for fair weather. They were hardy and physically strong, but oppressed and wholly under the hooves of their cousins.

At least, that was what some believed, Twilight reflected as her group came to a halt. She had never given it much thought, beyond the cursory reading of the liberation literature found in her library. Some of it had even been written centuries ago by the famous unicorn, Hammerhooves, a pony who had adopted a new name out of a desire to show kinship with his brothers, the earth ponies. He had led a small band in collective, violent rebellion against the crown. While many earth ponies still respected his intentions and viewed him as something of a folk hero, history and polite society remembered him as a murderous brute, and his remarkably eloquent manuscripts had been banned and burned. There were some advantages to being the Princess' faithful student, however.

On this day, in a field of trimmed grass carpeted by fallen red and yellow leaves and dotted with immaculate stones, she realized the utter silliness both of the doctrine of earth pony oppression and those who held it as true. The foundations of their theory lay in shifting, sinking sand. Whether disenfranchised or not, earth ponies possessed far more power than either unicorns or pegasi.

The earth ponies patently ruled the earth. It was difficult to say if anypony else fully realized what that meant. Lords of the earth, they possessed a profound, intimate connection to the land and soil themselves, and thus the fastest pegasus and the most powerful unicorn were subject to the lowliest earth pony.

Pegasi might rule the air and command the weather, but The Sun had fashioned them from the dust of the earth. Unicorns might dream of the stars and forever reach out to touch them, but at the fall of night, to the dust they returned. The earth was the foundation of their being, and it was all to which they amounted.

Just like the unicorn being buried today, the land ruled them all.

Twilight Sparkle shifted her weight back and forth on her fore-hooves, frowning slightly as a robed unicorn, standing beside a drab wooden box, finished committing Tempest Rouser to the Princesses' eternal care. The box was simple wood, unadorned. It fit with what little Twilight could remember about Tempest, a unicorn whose simple and reserved nature had ever been at odds with her name. As the small congregation of ponies looked on in silence, and a pair of nondescript but well-muscled ponies lowered the box into the earth, Twilight started. It only now dawned on her that she couldn't recognize anypony. Not a single face was familiar. She lowered her gaze so that no pony could catch her eyes.

The stallion leading the proceedings, attired in the common vestment of the Lunarian cult, a faction which had only begun to recover from ten centuries of obscurity due to the recent return of their mistress, called for a moment of prayer. Unlike the robes of Celestia's monks, which were heavily adorned with gemstones much to Rarity's professed delight, the priest's garment was relatively spartan. A royal purple hem traced the edges of the coarse black raiment which covered the wearer from his neck to his rear fetlocks, concealing his flank and replacing the sign of his special talent with an embroidered crescent moon that mirrored the one borne by Princess Luna. Billowing out in the front and rear, falling over both pairs of legs, the robe covered equally black, skin-tight undergarments that ended just above his hooves. The priest's face was a contradiction. Gray hairs traced his lips and splashed over the sides of his square, brick-like face, offsetting an otherwise maroon coat and lending him an air of distinction, but the harsh gray led up to soft eyes.

Twilight shook her head. Staring was rude, especially when she had just been commanded to enter into prayer. Her eyes flew closed at the thought that now arose: surely all the other ponies had seen her faux-pas. She was certain that they were watching her, obviously wondering, as she was, why she was there, and they were asking themselves why she, Celestia's personal student, who had banished demigods, who had saved Equestria several times over, would attend this funeral. She could feel their open eyes on her. Her eyelids closed tighter against the sensation, her brow furrowing. It was obvious to her that everypony in the small group of unicorns, most of whom were members of Tempest's family Twilight assumed, was watching the out-of-place bookworm.

The Lunarian priest spoke out again, cutting into the silence by offering a benediction to close the official service and dismiss the assemblage. Heat blossomed across Twilight's face, tinting her cheeks an almost imperceptibly deeper shade of purple, and she kept her eyes shut to the soft sounds of murmuring voices and shuffling hooves that started up the moment the priest stopped speaking.

Seconds ticked by before she felt a hoof fall upon her shoulder. She gritted her teeth, flinching at the touch and the noise that rattled inside her skull. Turning to look at the owner of the hoof, she found herself staring at a slender, middle-aged, grey-coated unicorn. His face was black and his eyes red. She fumbled over her own dry lips.

"Ms. Sparkle?" he asked. His tone carried a question, but also the sense that he already had the answer.

She let out a huff that she worried came across too much like a chuckle. "Uh- yes."

"I thought that it was you, but I didn't realize that you knew our Tempest," he said, taking his hoof from her shoulder and maneuvering to stand before her.

Twilight blinked once and then let loose a flurry. "We worked together a few times while studying at Canterlot Academy."

"It's odd that she never mentioned it, or brought you to meet me and her mother."

Twilight sniffed and rubbed at her foreleg. Had Tempest ever offered, she wondered. It was so hard to remember things like that. She could quote from the esoteric manuscripts she hadn't read since her Academy days, and recite laws of physics and the rules of magic, but it was as if there was a blank hole in her mind. She couldn't remember actually working with Tempest, though she knew that she had collaborated with her. They were both listed as authors on her paper on the functional similarities between Chaos Magic and white alteration spells. Twilight remembered that, certainly. It was impossible for her to recall any offer to meet with Tempest's parents, but Twilight could easily rewrite the paper, even if she hadn't read it since its publication. The purple unicorn decided that, yes, Tempest probably had invited her to dinner, or the like, but the memories were simply not there. That was how memory worked; it just fluttered in and out.

"We were just colleagues, I suppose."

"Well, I'm sure she would have been glad that a mare like you would take the time to come out here." His eyes flitted about. "It's an honor," he said with a crooked smile.

"Not at all. It's the least I could do for a friend," she said, the platitude, a silly social nicety, spilling out before she had the chance to think. Social nicety was why he'd come to her. It was why she'd said it. So much of what they did came down to it. Twilight would never have considered it before she had left Canterlot. She had been too practical to care about something that was meaningless, swallowed up by history, science, magic, or any number of other things. Twilight looked to her colleague's grave, away from the stallion's darkening eyes.

She still saw it when the stallion pursed his lips, eyes focusing finally and narrowing. "Of course, Ms. Sparkle. It was good of you to come." He shifted his weight, turning to look back over his shoulder. "If you'll excuse me."

Twilight took note that it wasn't a question.

With a slight nod of his head as a salutation, the stallion's awkward steps carried him off towards a group of unicorns that had clustered around an only slightly disheveled mare and the Lunarian priest. Similar groups littered the yard, the remnants of the service now dispersed. Trickles of ponies moved between them, greeting, reminiscing, and then parting.

Watching him go, Twilight couldn't help but think that, of course, friends would have been there before the funeral, and before there was a need for a funeral.

Wind whipped up the leaves that littered the ground and caused a tremor to rock her body. Her coat prickled. She looked up. The sun had disappeared behind bulbous, gray clouds that bled into one another and passed rapidly through the sky, dragging a wall of darkness behind them. Twilight couldn't fathom the logistics of the move, or the reasons for the passage over Canterlot, but as the night was scheduled to be clear, the Pegasi must have been transporting the storm to an outlying town. No matter how much she learned, there would always be things that she could not know. Her vision was clouded like the sky.

A break allowed sunlight to pour through. It was like water held back by an ancient dam that was finally overcome. By some freak coincidence, by the action of some weatherpony whom she could not see, the light splashed over the graveyard, the purple pony, the new grave, the family, the priest, and the father joining them. Twilight squinted against the brightness. That kind of coincidence was, to Twilight, especially off-putting. To her, things deserved explanations, reasons, purposes. Randomness, chance, was revolting. She always had to factor it in to her experiments, knowing that it was a fundamental fact of nature, but she didn't have to like it.

After gazing at her colleague's headstone for some time, Twilight's eyes drifted to the Lunarian priest in the crowd beyond. The maroon stallion took his leave, trotting towards her. His robe billowed outwards, flaring in a sudden, chilly breeze, and she inclined her head to one side at his approach. A hoof scuffed along the ground.

There was no acknowledgment of her presence when he passed her, not even the turning of an eye, but something caused her muscles to relax.

The stallion stopped at a nearby tree, and Twilight frowned when he withdrew a pipe and a small bag from his robes. His horn glowed red while he moved the object to his lips after filling it, and then his aura flared. Smoke bloomed from his pipe in a burst of magic and flame. Somehow, it seemed familiar to the purple unicorn, but she could not understand why. She couldn't remember.

Once he had finished his pipe, the young mare looked away; staring was rude. While pockets of ponies still encircled her, most had either left already or were in the process of leaving, following a winding path that led through the fields and back to the main building near the entrance of the cemetery. Favoring the tombstone with one final glance, Twilight reached inside herself, focusing the lines of power that ran through her body down to the bone. Her horn sparked, sending out a nimbus of purple light that undulated between a softly wavering shell and a jagged oval. The energy built upon itself, folding over, until a white halo formed around the outer edges, and then coated her body. In a flare of purple light, Twilight popped out of existence, leaving the rapidly emptying field behind.

* * *

A flash and fizzle accompanied Twilight's return to reality. She breathed in and out, trying to calm the fire of mystic exertion that burned like lactic acid through every inch and cell of her body.

The use of teleportation magic was significantly more involved than most non-unicorns knew. On the one hand, a pony could break down an object into its constituent parts with relative ease, store the patterns without needing to understand them in a mystic field, and then recreate them in another location. However, this mode of transmission had terrifying implications. The object assembled would not truly be the same as the one with which the unicorn began. It would be something completely different, yet fundamentally the same. Given its moral, religious, and philosophical implications, such simple teleportation had been outlawed ages ago. The modern method was much more complex, as it required a weaving together of multiple spells. To teleport, a pony had to transmit herself through an underlying dimension. Certain heretical scholars surmised that this level of being was, in fact, the non-corporeal "body" out of which the Deity Alicorns formed. More mainline theorists proposed that it was the wellspring of magic into which all Unicorns dove when using magic. In their view, the alicorn served merely as a focus for an external energy source. This explained why a unicorn did not lose weight when using tremendous amounts of magic, as Twilight had done when she had levitated an Ursa Minor for kilometers; the energy did not come from burning off calories but from a seemingly inexhaustible, external source.

And the fire had cooled. Twilight pressed her shoulder blades together and looked to the distance. She now stood in low-lit room, its ceiling stretching above her head to a height of nearly ten meters. Ordered rows of bookshelves spread out around her. She could see neither the beginning nor end of them. They went on to infinity. An old smell, the smell of age itself, almost palpable enough to chew and to taste, hung heavy,oppressive, and comforting. Twilight's tongue felt as if it began to dry out immediately as it flicked over her upper lip. She gulped down air.

The young mare trotted down the corridors of shelves, never fumbling in the darkness or pausing for a moment even when she looked towards the classification marks on the books or the shelves for direction.

There was a wonderful thing about books that few ponies understood – a wonderful secret. Books knew everything. They knew everything there was to know. There was nothing new under Celestia's sun, so all a pony had to do was learn the classification systems, know the authors and their names. She just had to find the right book; navigate the infinite library. However wonderful books were by their very nature, so many were superfluous. It was impossible for there to be an end to them. Some could instruct, goad, correct, and admonish, but only those few written by the wise. Navigation was everything. As she well knew from more than her fair share of late nights spent reading, the flesh was weak. Even she had fallen asleep on occasion during an all-night reading binge. There was no energy to waste. The same was true of time.

Only when she reached her destination did she stop to scan the shelves before her. Focusing her magic, Twilight projected a beam of white-purple light that traced over the bottom shelves, allowing her to read the titles and authors of the various books as it swept along. With a soft exhalation, she plucked a book from the shelves in a telekinetic flare and then continued her search. After collecting several texts, she moved on, a trail of radiant books, some old, some new, and some at the very edge of falling to pieces, trailing behind her like rats, or children, behind the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

She repeated her process, traveling to other sections of the empty library to collect more texts, adding to the train that followed her. When satisfied, she again manipulated the energy that sparkled around her horn. The books swarmed around her, shuddering, and then piled up into one large rectangular mass. For a moment, the energy field surrounding them grew in intensity as Twilight layered a final spell over them, mirroring the one that blossomed around her body, before both she and her books disappeared in a literal and figurative flash.

******Author's Notes**:

I have not watched any of season 3. There may be aspects of this story which are out of continuity. It may be best regarded as a divergent narrative line which takes place after season 2, ignoring any official events after the season finale. It is not an Alternate Universe fiction, but diverges from the main continuity at one point due to a lack of knowledge on my part.

And one thing specifically about future chapters: I don't care for Cadence. I cannot help but imagine her as a lesser being than Luna and Celestia. Her nature and back-story are not well established in the cartoon, and what we do know seems at times contradictory or simply illogical. Lacking an in-continuity, definitive explanation for her existence and apparent non-existence during critical moments in the series and its history - aside from the fact that the creators hadn't yet thought her up to sell new toys - I have reduced her here to a winged unicorn, a demi-god like figure.


	2. Better Than Both Is He

Twilight reappeared in a relatively small chamber, the walls of which immediately began to press down on her. This sensation passed as she grew accustomed to her new surroundings. The collection of books in her mystic grip arranged themselves neatly in a corner, out-of-the-way but kept safe by her hold. Stain-glass windows that depicted philosophers, scientists, and authors, including Starswirl the Bearded and Seaspear the Mutable Protector, lined the walls and cast faint streaks of colored light that intersected and blurred together on the floor. More bookshelves lay along the back wall just behind a weathered reception desk. Twilight recalled the storm clouds that she'd seen earlier and noted that the pegasi must have finished passing through Canterlot. The air here was fresh as the outdoors. Though the scent of books still lay heavy on her, mingled with it was a heady mix of fragrances from nearby flower gardens, visible out a second tier of less ornate, open windows.

Twilight frowned at the lonely desk, and then looked about her. There was no receptionist; it was distinctly unprofessional and inconsiderate for a pony to leave her post. A sound of hoof-falls caught her attention. Each beat was off time, accompanied by a shuffle only to be followed by an unnatural pause. She blinked and nodded slightly.

"Hello?" she said, before the shuffling had reached the nearby entryway.

The hoofsteps ceased, their echo still ringing, though she could barely hear the soft sound. Twilight moved to the doorway, poking her head out to look down the hall.

Before her stood a stallion whose golden mane was barely visible, shaved almost into nonexistence. His size outstripped even that of Big Macintosh. Unlike the farmer, who was thick but lacked definition, fine muscles cut through this stallion's barrel-like body. They rippled under his light blue coat as he began to move forward. What set him even further apart from the gentle giant of the Apple family was that this stallion was not an earth pony but a Pegasus. On his hip there was a small but radiant sun, split with a smile, and Twilight couldn't help but think that it seemed rather pathetic compared to the Sun on Celestia's flank. Twilight looked into his left eye and then shifted her gaze out and down. The side of his face was free of wrinkles, though he was not youthful, and his square jaw jutted out like an outcropping of rock.

She acknowledged that he would have been handsome had not the right half his face been melted into a twisted patch of red scars. His right eye was gone entirely, missing, but seemingly covered over with congealed flesh. The hue of his scars shifted as they moved down his neck, changing from red to a shade of brown, and then they blossomed out over his side, encompassing the empty pocket in his shoulder that was all that remained of his right foreleg. It then splashed upwards over his side and back as if it had consumed his entirely nonexistent right wing.

"Hey, Kid," the stallion said, shambling towards her with a level of dignity at which Twilight could only marvel. It seemed amazing that he could stand, let alone walk, but with awkward, if obviously practiced, flaps of his remaining wing, he somehow managed to do both.

As he drew near, Twilight saw that he was appraising her, his good eye trailing over her face and relatively petite body. While she was hardly the best judge of such things, she knew the gaze was not in the least improper. There was nothing unwholesome there.

"Hello," Twilight replied. "I think I've seen you around once or twice, but I don't believe we've ever met." She quirked her head. "That's something of a surprise, really."

"I guess I stand out, huh?" He lurched forward, causing Twilight to hop and then glance around furtively. "Name's Sun Bright. Been here a while, but only just started to work the counter. Not that strange that you never saw me. It's a big place. Lot of jobs; lot of staff."

"It's a pleasure to meet you," Twilight replied. "I'm-"

"Kid," he interjected, and Twilight felt a prickling sensation over her back, "everypony knows who you are. You're something of a celebrity."

"Ohl, I don't know about that." The books off in the other room wavered in her grip, and her horn sputtered ever so slightly.

"I do. It was a big deal when you moved out to Ponyville. Or it was after you took out Nightmare Moon. How's it working out for you?" He joined her in the doorway, Twilight pressing to the side slightly to accommodate his bulk. Together they shuffled into the room.

"Well, the research is both fascinating and fulfilling, and the ponies... the ponies are wonderful," she replied, though she found that the question was somewhat personal and, perhaps, a little untoward. Her steps were awkward and clipped as she tried to keep up with him far larger strides while accounting for his disability. At the moment, the only thing that was more difficult than struggling to match him was trying to hide the fact that she was trying.

"Fieldwork is more enjoyable than I ever imagined, though I think that's a function of the "who you're with" variable, double-u, rather than the "what you're doing" factor, double-u subscript one." Her head bobbed sagely. "I admit that I'm still working out the equations."

The stallion huffed and snorted at the same time, culminating in a rumble in the back of his throat. "As far as I can tell, that means that you're getting out more and you're doing it with other ponies. That's good to hear." He shuffled behind the desk at the back of the room. The fair half of his face twisted. "How about a coltfriend?"

Now that, Twilight thought, was distinctly untoward.

"Oh no," she said, coughing uncomfortably and waiving her hoof back and forth so fast that it blurred. She had too many potential topics of research, too much reading to get done, too many adventures to share with her friends. Relationships took time, and a romantic entanglement, such a silly thing, was hardly worth the effort expended. She took up a position on the other side of the desk. "I'm not interested in that sort of thing."

"So a marefriend, then." He nodded with a strange mock dignity, the creases around his eyes deepening. "You look like the type."

"Ugh," Twilight muttered as she shrunk in on herself. "If you're looking for research on romance, talk to my brother. That's his specialty. I don't have the time for it."

"That was another big deal, Kid. I saw that he got married, but had some trouble with wedding crashers." He laughed; the two sides of his body shook unevenly. "All the Canterlot snobs needed the exercise anyways."

"I'm glad you enjoyed it more than I did," Twilight grumbled.

"Anyways, Kid, friends are miracles enough in themselves. Shouldn't ask for too much," he said, plopping down to the ground. The muscles of his one foreleg rippled as it held his weight without any signs of discomfort. His head and shoulders poked out from behind the desk, despite the fact that it was built for a standing pony.

Twilight replied by turning her nose up at him. In the corner, her books swirled, shuffling around each other before gently crossing to room to rest at the purple pony's side.

"So, what are we checking out today?" the stallion asked, leaning forward, his left brow furrowing. His right brow was always furrowed.

"Oh, just some references for private study," Twilight said while levitating the pile of books down to the reception desk.

"Let's have a look. Got to keep records in case you forget to return one, right?" he finished before gripping the first text in his teeth and pulling it to the side. After repeating the action with the rest of the collection, the texts lay spread out before him.

He hummed thoughtfully at them. "Hard times, Kid?"

Twilight trailed her eyes over the books, examining their titles and authors, some famous and some obscure, ignoring the obvious look of understanding on the stallion's face. "I don't know what you mean," she said finally.

"I see." He slid himself slightly closer to the edge of the desk to lean his head out. "Thought it was kind of odd, you showing up back in Canterlot. I take it that it wasn't just for the library, was it?"

He looked down and then up, his eye half-lidded. Then he nosed one of the books so that it lay straight in front of him. The collection was out-of-place, disorganized. There was no longer any principle behind them. Dates and authors' names splashed around haphazardly. It was no worse than it had been a few minutes earlier, but it ___was_ worse.

Twilight felt her hooves itch deep inside the soft flesh. There was a pumping mechanism there. Horses and ponies were built to move. When they raised their legs, veins opened up, connected to the soft core of the hoof, and blood welled, carried in by gravity and the strength of a pony's mighty heart, even that of the weakest and frailest bookworm. When the hoof fell, impacted against the ground, cartilage and bone shifted to send the blood roaring back.

The physics and biology of it all was fascinating. It was a rather complex process; fluid dynamics dominated. Hooves were like miracles, designed to offset the inferior design of the body. No system of muscles existed to pump deoxygenated blood up from the lowest parts of a pony's body properly; the legs were too long, too far away from the heart. So it was like they had four little hearts in their hooves. The systems were different, and so was the oxygen content of the blood they transmitted, unused or consumed, but ponies had five hearts. They linked to each other, worked together, sending lifeblood back and forth in constant communication.

The faster a pony ran, the faster her hearts beat. Of course, that was the only thing that made sense. In the chest or in the hoof, hearts were no different. They set their pace to a pony's need.

"Somepony I knew died," Twilight said.

He hummed again, the exact same hum.

"I see." He slid himself slightly closer to the edge of the desk to lean his head out. "You were here for Tempest Rouser's funeral, right?"

"Did you know her?" Twilight asked in response after swallowing something deep in her throat.

Sun Bright shook his head, the thick muscles that clenched across his shoulders and neck sending obvious ripples through his deformed skin. "More like I know of her, and that her funeral was today. Most ponies around here do now. That sort of thing is uncommon."

"Of course," Twilight said, face constricting as she nodded glumly. "I should have realized."

Silence fell over them for a time while Sun Bright leaned down, using his mouth to grasp the handle of a drawer set in the table's rear. Twilight peered over the desk at him, watching inquisitively as he fished about. His jaw clenched and a light smacking noise of tooth enamel meeting with something solid sounded out before he withdrew from the drawer with a metal pen in his mouth.

Twilight herself could never stand them, preferring a quill and ink. The other races found that it was not in the least pleasant to write using something soft when it was held in the mouth. That didn't even cover how distasteful it was for a pony to get the downy material stuck inside of her teeth, something which was unavoidable. Most unicorns had similarly abandoned quills, and it was rather difficult for Twilight to fathom why "Quills and Sofas" so frequently ran out of the former item. As Sun Bright clicked the nub at the end with his tongue, extending the pen's tip, and began to take note of the titles that adorned the collection of texts before him, the purple unicorn reflected that her love of the less efficient, almost archaic writing utensil did not really make any objective sense.

Her mind wandered, her eyes fogging over, and, without thought, she stared down at Sun Bright while he worked. She prided herself on her rationality and reasonability regarding most matters and in most circumstances – other than, perhaps, cases of tardiness. Given that, there was no reason for her to prefer the messy and inaccurate utensil over something that was in all ways more effective. It wasn't even that the tactile sensation of gripping the quill was more pleasant, something she would have ignored anyways, as a quill and a pen were almost indistinguishable to a telekinetic touch. The quill was a relic, and she was a modern pony, sometimes consumed with ancient literature, perhaps, but always concerned with what was practical. New inventions often were. Of course, Princess Celestia had always used quills.

"Say, Kid," Sun Bright said, causing Twilight to jump. It was then that she saw that he had finished taking down the titles of her loans and had stacked them back up into a pile. Doing so must have taken him quite some time, given that he had to do it by mouth, and Twilight narrowed her eyes at her lingering inattentiveness. She had no idea how long he'd been done. For her, it was so easy to get lost while cogitating.

"Mind if I tell you something?" the stallion continued, not betraying any sign that he had either noticed or cared about her lack of focus. "It's not a secret or anything. I've told other ponies before."

The alicorn atop her head seemed to sizzle, as if it was piercing into molten metal. "I don't suppose that would be a problem," she said slowly, rubbing her mouth with the front of her leg, hiding her lips behind it.

"When they get a load of me, most ponies wonder what happened. Do you?" he asked, twisting his neck and turning the healthy side of his face from her to allow her to see his scars and nothing else. From that angle, with only his deformed flesh in view, he was eyeless and blind, and it suddenly struck Twilight as one of the most horrible things she could ever imagine.

"Oh, well, it's not my place to ask about something like that," she said, fumbling slightly until he turned back to watch her, face to face, letting her see his eye once again. "It would be rude. A pony should always help a friend, but part of that is knowing when it's best to leave them be."

He rolled the pen along the table, back and forth, with his wing. "Maybe, but we aren't really friends, and you're you. From what I can tell, you're the curious sort."

"I'm sorry. I never meant to offend you," Twilight responded, trying to recall any improper words, actions or looks on her part. It often came as a surprise when her natural inquisitiveness caused offense. She found that she could sometimes bumble into things without recognizing how other ponies might react, not through a lack of planning or care, for she over-planned most things and certainly did not wish to upset anyone, but because she simply hadn't grasped how other ponies might feel or react.

"It was wrong of me to pay attention to how you looked, rather than being curious about the kind of pony you were on the inside. A pony is who he is, and that's what's important. I should have known better." She ignored the fact that he had appeared so horrible only moments before when she had lost sight of his eye.

He snorted and dismissed her with a shrug of his massive frame. "Don't be hard on yourself, Kid. You didn't do anything wrong, and, heck, it wouldn't have bothered me if you'd asked. I'm made of sterner stuff." He sniffed, turning his head upwards in a look of clearly feigned indignation.

"I'm glad" she replied, raising a hoof to brush back her mane as if wiping away perspiration. "The last thing I ever would have wanted to do was to offend you just because you looked different."

"It'd be because I look terrifying, not because I look different," he said while absently rolling his pen back and forth along the table with his lone wing.

"Regardless."

"Oh, irregardless, indeed," he said with a smirk that only played across the left side of his lips.

Irregardless? It was a needling, a ribbing, a gesture to provoke, and thus to ease and apologize. She could tell - and she was usually not so perceptive - because she could feel it, a twitch running through her entire body, wiping something clean. She rolled her eyes with a hearty groan, shuffling closer to the desk to jab a hoof under the stallion's nose.

"You should know as well as I do that 'irregardless' is a completely unnecessary construction," she groused. "It is a useless, nonstandard adverb with two negative elements that introduce nothing but pointless confusion, and it doesn't conform to the grammatical standards of the Equestrian language. It should be done away with."

"Alright, Kid, I get it," he sighed. "Can't take a joke, can you."

"Not when it comes to nonstandard adverbs," she pressed. Her eyes were alight. "They're serious business."

He stomped his forehoof to the desk, and then leaned over, nickering. "So do you mind?"

"No," she said, fingering one of the books between them with her telekinetic grip. "But maybe I should. It seems rather personal. Why would you talk to me about it?"

"Because you're Twilight Sparkle," he replied, like it explained anything, and he shook his head as if he pitied her stupidity. "Now, I'll try to keep this short. I had a fine, regular childhood in Cloudsdale, a normal Ma and Pa, though I was always stronger than most other kids. You can tell why." He flexed the muscles in his one leg, though he seemed in no way boastful.

"My special talent... well, doesn't really matter." He rubbed his chin into his shoulder. "I joined the Imperial Guard for the usual reasons. I was a pretty idealistic kid. Most of us were at that age. Honor. Serve. Defend. All that stuff."

A sharp cracking noise broke into the room; a fall. It rang through the starting Twilight and the unaffected stallion, artificial and icy. Together, they glanced to the windows and saw nothing. Perhaps, Twilight thought, it was distant construction work.

Once the reverberations had died away, Sun Bright continued to speak. "As a kid, it all seems like you're doing something with your life. Like it matters. The training was hard, but you get through it because you know it means something. First day there, I learned that I wasn't as strong as I thought I was. It's a big fish, little pond, kind of thing. A tiny little guy could beat the feathers off of me. You don't fight strong; you fight smart. I was never very good at that. You get out of training eventually, and you get out ___there,_ and you think that now you're going to really do something. But things start to change. Maybe I just grew up... I don't know. I saw a lot of ponies die out there over the years. Going hard, going easy. Slow and quick. Good and bad. Both the ponies and the going," he trailed off, his eyes glazing as the hairs of his coat bristled.

Twilight shuffled about silently, leaning her head down to rest her chin on the desk. From that angle, she could see the clear division of flesh and hair along the stallion's chin. He didn't seem to mind.

"I was already pretty seasoned by the time my last real assignments took me out to the Empyreal Thunder mountain range back when us and the Griffins were staring each-other down over it thirteen years ago. Don't ask me why, but they wanted to stick some aeries along the border. It didn't make any sense to me why they'd want to raise young in a constant thunderstorm, but we weren't going to let them set up so close to Equestrian cities on the other side of the range. Now, the Princess could have stopped them in a heartbeat by refusing to raise the sun over their territory. The boys would have gotten a real kick out of throwing the fear of the Goddess into 'em, but she..." He stopped for a moment and smiled, thick, hearty and bulbous like an engorged maggot, before continuing in a voice that contained equal measures of boisterousness and reverence. "She was better than that," he said, and Twilight allowed him a moment's pause, though the desire to learn, and to inquire, burned her.

"We were at a stalemate for a while, with the Griffins on their side of the border just beyond the mountain range," he continued at last. "We figured that they outnumbered us because earth ponies were at best only useful for support when we had to fight Griffins at the top of a mountain, unicorns couldn't make the climb, and something in the mountains screws with teleportation magic. So all we had to our advantage was the mountain range itself. You can't fly over the Empyreal Thunder mountain range; you'd get blasted out of the sky in a second. So they'd have to go through one of several passes that let you cross the mountains safely just under the thunderstorm. We set up our defenses in those, but the tight spaces took away our mobility just as much as it did theirs. For a while, neither side looked like they wanted to start something, even if we were all itching to get at each-other."

Twilight shambled up to the table, her eyes flitting from Sun Bright's face to the pile of books between them. There was something simply wrong about staring at him, but glancing away was equally unacceptable. For his part, the stallion simply looked at her, into her, with his one eye. Every blink was criminal.

"We realized why they'd been waiting when they hit us by surprise. See, the last time that the Pegasi had gone to war with the Griffins, before we all settled in Equestria, there was no such thing as a griffin with magic. Even worse, Griffins aren't like us ponies. Their spell-casters can still fly just as well as their regular soldiers. We later guessed that they'd spent their time whipping up a mass invisibility spell that let their mages get the drop on us twice over. In the confined space, they just let loose. There was no way out for us. I didn't really last too long; a fireball grazed me, took off the right side of my face, and I went down. Right after that, as near as I can figure, one of their mages set off a disruption spell that caused an avalanche. Getting half crushed under a rock was probably what saved my life. They thought that they'd killed me, along with almost everypony else. Lost the leg, and shattered the wing. They had to, well, you know," he clenched the muscles along his scarred side, highlighting the obvious absence, "when they dragged me out. A few months later, they let me out of the hospital and shuffled me around for a bit. They didn't know what to do with me; there was a good report for faithfulness, and loyalty, and bravery, but I received nothing for it. Now, it was about this point where the Princess got involved and arranged jobs for wounded stallions like me, and I got set up here."

"Why?" Twilight asked. Even to her, the sound of her one word was like a whine, high-pitched and irritating compared to his deep bass. Of all times to interrupt, for all the reasons to break into his tale, into him, she had chosen now. How utterly foolish, she realized, but she had committed herself.

"Forgive me," she began, uncertain and asking for his grace twice over, "but you didn't have any experience, and judging by the bookshelf behind you, you've never been able to catalog very well, and since your arrival - twelve years ago, was it?- the library has misplaced seventeen regular books, five manuscripts, and two texts from the rare books collection. That's worse than the previous twenty years. I know. I keep track of library records." Even as she spoke, she was self-conscious enough to know that she had done something inappropriate and that bumbling around the issue, trying to make it better, only made it worse. She lowered her head. "Of course, correlation doesn't imply causation."

He shuffled back and forth, eyebrow raised, obviously amused, tolerant, not angry.

"Sorry." She knew to apologize anyways, and she doubted if the pony who had left over a year ago would have understood enough to do so. Had that younger pony been in her place, she likely would have been proud had she realized her error and apologized. Today, she also knew enough to not feel proud; quite the opposite.

"Anyways, nopony told me, and I never asked. I didn't figure it was important," he continued. "Before the boys rallied to beat the Griffons back and then drag me out, I just managed to get an eye open to watch everything burn. It was hard to breathe, for a lot of reasons. I remember, clear as day, seeing one pony go down. He was screaming and frothing, and his eyes were about to burst from the heat and the pain. I just stared at him, and I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't feel anything for him, and I couldn't feel my leg, my wing, or my eye." Using his wing to support himself, Sun Bright shoved a hoof to the space that would have been between his eyes and twisted the appendage back and forth. It split his face in two, allowing her to see only the edges of the grin along his face, lips peeled back from his teeth like a wound clamped open, exposing the jagged, interlocking, off-white vertebrae of the spine.

"I think he was trying to say something." Sun Bright's head shook; it shuddered, though the rest of his body was still and there was no visible strain in his muscles. He pulled his hoof away.

"I know he was. He was begging. Then a Griffin walked by and split his head open. I kept on watching him burn, and I realized something while I looked at the flames eating up what was left of everything. Pops of burning wood or fat sent sparks flying, the wind caught them up and took them away, and it all just came to me as they floated off. I watched the sparks rise up into the air and I realized that the kind of pony who's born into troubles, who's sure to suffer, is lucky in his own way."

Twilight frowned, tempted to reach out to the books that lay between them. He returned his focus to her, and began to tap his lone forehoof against the counte, resting his weight on the upper portion of his leg. His eyes were intense, locked on her, but they were still clouded over, somehow both wholly in the present and somewhere else entirely.

"Now, I'll never run again, or fly again, or see right." He rolled his shoulder, and huffed loudly, though his face was bright. "And now I feel it every day. Every second."

"How could any pony leave you like this?" Yes, this was the time to interrupt. There was a wrong here that was intolerable. "You could use magic. I- There are spells that could let you fly." She stumbled for a moment between sentences when she bit her lip to keep herself from say that she knew spells that could let him fly. "Surely somepony must have told you. They could get you flying again in a few hours, and I'm sure that there are doctors who could proscribe periodic anesthetic spells. "

He laughed, and it was neither bitter nor mocking. "Kid, I don't have a leg, and my leg hurts. There's no magic in the world that can take away that kind of pain. As for flying? You're a unicorn. You don't understand. If you set me up with a new pair of wings so that I could fly without using mine, without feeling mine, it would be worse than never flying ever again. I know. I tried."

"But," Twilight started, her voice wavering, unsure, as she assessed his claim with reason, rather than the emotion that had provoked her outburst. She looked away from the large stallion who stood before her. "By your logic, isn't that a good thing? I mean-" she trailed off, wishing she had a quill and paper to properly formulate a written question.

"I know what you mean, Kid," he replied. "And you're right. I never pity a pony who goes painfully, especially when it's a long time in coming, because that's the best way to go."

"I don't get it. All this just doesn't make any sense," Twilight interjected, stamping her hoof into the ground, heedless now of the danger of interruption or insult. The loud crack rang like a hammer on an anvil and she winced immediately at the sound and the unintended, accidental violence. But, again, she had committed herself.

"With everything a pony goes through in life, she deserves peace at the end. Ponies who are loved in life, and especially the ones who aren't, should be loved in death. Someone should be there to show them that they mattered." She saw her forelegs and muzzle before her. She focused on them.

"No, dying should be like climaxing. It should be a release. It's a miserable thing for a happy pony to die, and a happy thing for a miserable one." He withdrew, and for a moment he reminded Twilight of a tortoise. She waited for him, lips pursed and face tight because the sun was low in the sky, and as it shined through the windows, partially blocked by the gaps between them, it cast colored light and shadows that mingled on his face, meeting, fusing, and breaking apart with every subtle movement of his form. It enthralled.

"At that last moment, he can go with a smile because he doesn't have to think or feel anymore. A happy pony wants to hold on to life, and screams as he loses his grip. In the end, a pony who struggle to let go, falling apart and crying for the pain, is better off. He doesn't have to feel it anymore. There are no more unfulfilled wishes. No more disappointments." His sunken, healthy eye was lit red. It remained constant, but it seemed to throb painfully, as if he'd been rebuked and lost heart.

"Despite that, I guess that we can't help it," he said. "Most foals don't take their medicine because it's too bitter, even when they're sick to death. You have to force feed it to them." His lips cracked, sending shards of light and slivers of cracked flesh scattering. It was a broken smile.

"So, do you get it, Kid?" he asked, pressing his chin down to the top of the stack of books that lay between them, separating them.

To say she understood him was simple. His words had been easy enough to grasp. All of the tension that had been in her face, shoulders, back, and legs – not her whole body, but just its parts – melted. Names and titles stared up at her from the desk, embroidered or stamped or soaked into cloth and paper. What it meant for Tempest, a pony she hadn't even known, was self-evident, but all she could do was pause on the edge of something that she couldn't identify.

"Do you still want the books?" he pressed, but it was so very gentle that it seemed like a comforting hoof placed on her body. That did not capture the sensation that ran through her. The hoof was alicorn, a horn of a pony blessed by the grace of Celestia, trembling and electric with magic.

"Definitely," she replied, and her face was stern, creased as was his, but unbroken. Learning was everything, and books held the answers that ponies didn't.

He stared directly at her, though his good eye was closed and he was blind. It turned her stomach. She stood tall and unflinching, gazing straight back into him. Finally, without opening his eye, he simply said, "Alright."

The collection of texts throbbed purple and the stacks rose up. After twisting about in the air, they fell along side of her. And then he was at her side, just like the books. The back of his one wing pressed into her barrel, feathers soft against her side.

"Are you going to be ok?" she asked almost as a reflex to his touch.

"Kid, I was going to ask you that," he said, and his wing drew away from her, dragging and catching at the hair along her back. "I'm always fine." He thumped his healthy side with the wing between them, his only wing. "Made of sterner stuff, remember?"

"I do, Sun Bright," she said, her smile full and heartfelt and bright. "I'll be seeing you."

"Sure thing, Kid." With that, he turned back to his books, almost as if he was ignoring her and the light of her magic that shone forth. It undulated around her, piercing, as mystic muscles flexed and the alicorn bled warmth into the flesh of her forehead.

As Sun Bright raised himself up, pulling out a book while resting his forehoof on the shelf, it looked for a moment as if the mass of the wood and paper pressed him down. It was like it would come down on him and crush him. The very moment she thought this, her brain burst free from that plane of reality.

* * *

Twilight reassembled once again. Before her stood the largest building in Canterlot, the Princesses' home and hers. Dwarfing all the nearby buildings, it stood unassailable. It was all pure white spires, reaching up and out, and sun-like golden turrets. Instinctively, she drew breath on arrival. The scent of books still lingered in her nostrils and a hint of acrid smoke reached her from the hearths of some nearby homes.

It was then that Twilight remembered the Lunarian priest. And in that moment, the spires of Celesita's castle, the faint smells that played in her nose, the pipe, the tombstone, the kind face, the sudden, surprising submission to selfish addiction, and the warmth of the sun low in the sky all came together.

She set her shoulders and trotted towards a side entrance and the twin pegasi guards, white coated and gold armored, who stood before it. They acknowledged her. She ignored them. The larger of the two leaned down and unlatched the door, and then stood ramrod straight, throwing his chin out and puffing up with the slightest flutter of his wings. After entering through the passage, Twilight barely caught his mutterings that chased her inside along with her glowing collection of books. His words, like the doorways, hallways, and servants she passed, went unheeded because she remembered. As she would have done had she failed to recall an equation during an exam, she berated herself for ever forgetting. How could memory work like that? How could it be so fickle? Perhaps it was not a matter of forgetting; it was a failure of connection, an inability to see the links that bound things together.

When she had been a little filly, she had adored her grandfather. At the time, he had been so very old and so very frail. Twilight recalled that he had fought in a war as a young stallion, but she wasn't certain if he'd told her that or if she'd learned it from her parents or brother. She also wasn't certain why, now that the thought had occurred to her, it seemed to matter. In the years before she had truly learned to read, a precociously short period of time, she would often see him sitting in his armchair, a volume of poetry or a classic novel in his hooves or in the grip of his horn, and demand to join him. As her parents told the tale, the first time she had done so, they had thought that she was just being a silly filly, that she would quickly become bored, sitting with an old stallion, but her grandpappy had simply taken her up beside him, just as he would every other time she would ask in the future. His coat had smelled of smoke and his weathered book's pages of old age. Wrapped in those scents and his warmth, she would listen. Sometimes she could not understand the words, but she adored them just the same, hanging on his every wavering tone.

He had been so very old, and there had been something rotten inside of him, something that had been there ever since the war, but he had lived long enough to take her up onto his lap and have her read to him from texts that would have confounded ponies twice her age. By then, Twilight was able to understand death as did an adult. His loss had sent her into something akin to a depression, perhaps her first brush with a precursor to her admittedly neurotic tendencies as a fully grown mare. This was not, however, simply due to his death. Her extensive reading had added to her grief. Even though there was joy in reading and learning, there was so much sorrow in knowledge. Oftentimes, they grew together. She had learned the fate of the dead. Since Nightmare Moon's rebellion, the religion surrounding the lunar Princess had been all but dissolved. In its place, a series of superstitions and stigmas had arisen. After a millennium, the memory of the benevolent, if distant, Princess Luna had been almost washed away, and only those superstitions remained. By the time of Twilight's birth, the traditional belief was that the hour of a pony's death revealed something of his or her character and nature. In general terms, dying during the day was a final acknowledgment of a pony's commitment to the benevolent Princess of the Day. To die at night was a curse. It suggested that the soul would share in part of the bondage of its mistress, and that there was something deviant, some hidden and unconfessed darkness, at the pony's core, like selfishness or inconsideration.

Her Grandpappy had died during the night.

The knowledge that he had somehow led a morally questionable life, that another kind of rot had festered inside of him, sickened the young Twilight. Her parents had tried almost everything to bring her out of her melancholic state, from taking her to the Canterlot Library to buying a collection of accessories for Miss Smarty Pants. It was strange series of reactions, almost bumbling. Despite having raised a son, they were simply at a loss as to how to deal with the issue of death and address their daughter in some way that accounted for both her age and her intellect.

It was her brother who had found the answer, and it hadn't even had anything to do with the fact that he always seemed to have some way of understanding her, of dealing with her, that transcended their bond of blood and natural closeness. As he told the story, while attending classes at the Canterlot Academy, he had been studying in the library for a research paper on pegasi aerial combat techniques. Taking a break from his readings, his thoughts had turned to his younger sister and the problem that neither he nor their parents could seem to address. His troubled expression had caught the eye of a particular aged stallion who approached Shining Armour and inquired as to the cause of his distress. Her brother, while not generally open with strangers, least of all ones who would so readily intrude into an unknown pony's problems without invitation, had felt himself lulled into openness by the almost tangible sincerity in the older male's incredibly soft eyes. And so, Shining Armour had told the other pony about his little sister's problem.

The maroon stallion sat down next to him, commending Shining Armour for his empathy, and then proceeded to tell him a myth set down by their ancestors in pre-rebellion religious traditions. Twilight had later learned that they were fringe, heretical traditions, but the stallion had said nothing of that. According to texts which were supposedly penned by the primordial Alicorns before the birth of the first mortal pony, the divine realm divided into two distinct spheres, corresponding to light and darkness, day and night. As a system of worship developed around the two pure-blooded representatives of the Alicorn race, Princesses Celestia and Luna, and to a lesser extent the highly uncommon faux-Alicorns, or winged unicorns, ponies of renown and offspring of the sons and daughters of the Goddesses, scholars began to conceive of an afterlife inside those two heavenly realms.

To die during the day was to be raised into joy and eternal light. Details were remarkably precise regarding the eternal home promised to Celestia's devoted servants. As a mare, and from a purely objective perspective, Twilight found this rather strange, for most suppositions about things which a pony could neither see nor prove were often frustratingly vague. It was held universally that a pony would experience some form of never-ending activity in Celestia's heaven. This afterlife was something akin to a party, with companions reveling eternally in perfect bodies, restored, renewed, and free from any defect. They would share, and share in, every one of life's aesthetic pleasures. That kingdom would run over with sensuous delights for the eyes and the flesh. The realm itself was like a city of gold with unassailable towers of diamond that stretched for hundreds of cubits into the sky. Every kind of flowering plant and delicate fruit would grow, ever abundant and ever in season, in the wild gardens that rose up through the land beside crystal lakes. The city's meanest paving stones, let alone its works of art, were of such splendor that the fire of the reflected sun, of which the Equestrian sun was but a pale shadow on a dull cave wall (imagine, the sun, a shadow), would cauterize the eyes of any mortal pony so that she would not go mad from the sight.

It was all really rather formulaic.

However, a pony there would never be at peace. There would be no time for reflection, a sense of calm, or solitude with and in her own self, but she would never even have time to miss them.

A pony who died during the night would be ushered into eternal rest. She would know nothing but peace. What had once been tradition, at least among some heretics, held that existence in the realm of night was like unto the bliss of half-sleep experienced by a pony lying in bed on a frigid winter morning, knowing that outside the bubble of sheets and half-consciousness was the cold of the day, but also knowing that she was eternally secure from it. She would drift in sensation from powerlessness non-existence in the warmth to the god-like state of a lucid dreamer, detached from imagined pleasures, always knowing that they were nothing more than dreams, yet in complete control of them. She would always know that reality was a step removed but not care or need to care; she was in a warm bed, and she would have absolutely nothing that needed doing all day. It was an eternal Sunday morning without the glare of a sun.

However, the pony would not have companionship. She would be forever alone, but she would be at peace with her solitude just as she was at peace with all else.

Twilight had believed that story as a filly, though as she grew into marehood she adopted a more rational perspective on life. She would try not to believe anything. To believe was, at best, to hold something as true despite an absence of evidence. At worst it was to hold something as being true though the available evidence contradicted it. She had learned that reason excelled ignorance, excelled belief, just as much as the light did the darkness. Even when her vision was clouded, she still had eyes to see. To ignore reason was to walk in darkness, always blind. In the case of things she could not explain rationally, such as Pinkie Pie and her ... being Pinkie Pie, there was still ample evidence for the existence of her "Pinkie Sense," among her other talents. Whatever the cause of the pink pony's preposterous preternatural power, its results were observable, consistent phenomena. Twilight had realized that she needed neither to explain it (though being unable to do so irked her to no end), nor to believe in it. Its existence was objective.

An afterlife could not be observed or tested. She could find no substantiating evidence as to its existence or nature, merely superstitious supposition. In short, as a rational, grown mare, she could not believe the myths of the solar and lunar afterlives.

The books trailing behind her sagged, dragging her back, slowing her down. She knew that she had faith in them, in a system of knowledge, in there being answers and in her capacity to unearth them. Was not the infinite library itself an ideal, something in which she believed? Rationally, at best, there were no new arguments, no new struggles in nature, no new heartbreaks, no new experiences. Things changed forms, genres evolved, but the fundamental stories were the same. There was new knowledge, new discoveries, but a pony was always a pony; anger, fear, hope, and the fundamental nature of disagreements were now as they had always been. The characters of a story had always been there, even before they were written; their type had existed.

Perhaps, Twilight reflected, like her, Tempest had known of the doctrine of separate eternities. Perhaps, unlike the grown Twilight, she had believed in them. Maybe that was why she had died during the night; she had just wanted peace.

And that was the most horrible thing. Whatever her belief, what happened to Tempest would happen even to her. How could it possibly be true, Twilight wondered, that she gained nothing from her reason and the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime of study?

And then she came upon a weathered door. It appeared before her as if she had simply teleported there. She leaned her forehead against it, stretching her neck to a strange angle to accommodate her horn, pulsing with purple energy. A faint series of clicks sounded out from the other side of the door before it gave way, swinging open with a creak of old metal. Stepping inside, she closed the door and locked it behind her.


	3. I Call To Remembrance

Twilight's private quarters had always overflowed with books. When she had lived with Princess Celestia, or at least studied under her, dozens of carefully organized loans from the Palace library had complimented the small personal collection of several hundred texts, all personal favorites, in Twilight's chambers. She had always returned the borrowed codices, manuscripts, print texts, and assorted other items on time, precisely one day early and two hours before the closing time of the library so as to not bother the librarians during the library's high traffic periods or trouble them with irregular returns (imagine the horror and chaos that might be inspired by returning the books ___two_ days early). Returning them two hours early would leave the staff with enough time to properly record the returns so that they could re-shelve the books the next day without feeling off-put or inconvenienced too close to closing time.

Twilight sat in the corner of her royal chambers, flipping through a large tome at her study table. A mostly blank page of note paper lay next to her hoof and a pocket watch that rested against one towering stack of books. Much of her private library still rested comfortably in the bookshelves that lined three of the room's walls, though it spilled out into piles on the floor. They cried out, desperate for the re-shelving day that she'd planned in the last days of her stay in Canterlot. It, in turn, had been figuratively shelved when Twilight left for Ponyville. A spartan bed dressed with nearly crimson sheets lay along the fourth wall underneath a series of windows. Beyond the bed, a set of doors led out to a terrace that faced the rising sun each morning. The purple pony, her chair, reading desk, lit candles, and an unusually large set of texts that, even categorized into six separate piles which were themselves organized by date of publication, threatened at any moment to topple into chaos, all rested a meter or so from the foot of the bed.

Twilight huffed and her quill shook, sending splotches of ink scattering over her notes. Time for reflection had taught her tonight's only lesson. She hadn't even offered her apologies to Tempest's father for his loss. The only significance of that stranger's death, the only thing of which she had thought, was what it meant to her. It wasn't even a matter of feeling pain, and obsessing over it; she had treated Tempest, and the equine tragedy of it all, as a starting point, as something which inspired questions. The only thing that mattered was the event's impact on her; anything else had been forgotten.

It wasn't any different with Sun Bright. Though his story hadn't even made sense really. There were wounds unaccounted for, injuries and events that could not have happened as he recalled, and a survival that seemed unfeasible to say the least. There had been inconsistencies, holes, elements that were implausible and elements that were impossible. Elements; it all came down to elements, after all. Errors, failures of perception or recollection, impossibilities, were, of course, beside the point, and she felt that he'd known it.

She wondered how she could know that or believe it. How could she know a pony to whom she had spoken so little? What could she know of a pony whom she'd known for so short a time?

Soft purple light splashed over the table and its collection of texts, the glow extending out in a sphere and chasing the shadows behind the bookshelves and into the corners of the room, as Twilight telekinetically gripped her forehead and massaged her temples in time with an already present dull throb. She craned up to look to the sky through the room's large bay windows, and withdrew at the sight of high moon and radiant stars.

She couldn't even recall lighting the candles that sparked before her on the table in the cool evening breeze that filtered through the open windows. Twilight's eye's stung from reading, from the small print, and from time for reflection.

The sky was cloudless, and Twilight for a moment wished for her telescope. She could have passed by the observatories, but compared to the intimacy of her own room, they were cold and unfeeling places, filled with unfamiliar instruments that were far more powerful, practical, and useful than her own tools, gifts from family and friends that she had owned and cared for over the years. Suddenly it seemed wrong to watch the stars in a way that was impersonal, in a way that was scientific. On most days, that would have been a ridiculous thought.

It was then that the sky seemed to part, allowing a sliver of silver-blue light to pierce down through the night. Striking the balcony at its naked center, the light blossomed into a wavering circle. Fine particles, like miniature balls of plasma, swirled upwards from the stone as Twilight left her desk, head quirked, and trotted towards the door that led outside. The dust floated, softly tracing out patterns in the air, and the light stuck in place as if suspended in ether. It mingled with shadows that had no source. The purple unicorn plopped down before the door, eyes fixed. Her mystic presence probed outwards. She inhaled deeply, quickly, at the sight, and at the meeting of her aura and the energy. And then the dust outlined in sliver a set of hooves, a pair of legs and wings, a head, and a barrel.

"Salutations, Twilight Sparkle." The voice dispelled light, dust, and magic, leaving behind the fleshly, dark blue Princess of the Night.

"Princess, it's wonderful to see you again," Twilight said, standing up only to splay her forelegs and bow. Her horn pulsed and the door between them opened.

"Likewise," Luna agreed, stepping inside. "Events conspired to keep us apart during your last visit. It does my heart good to see you once more."

"No more majestic plural?" Twilight rose.

"Indeed. You taught me that ponies respond more readily to monarchs who refrain from elevating themselves too far above their subjects. A change in my manner of speech seemed appropriate. "

"It must have been very difficult for you."

The princess drew back as if struck, snorting and tossing her head. "Surely thou seeketh to affront Us," Luna spat, her voice rising like far off thunder, a sound that was soft only because of distance, waves expanding out and growing weak. Her eyes shone with white light, bathing the room with her gaze. "Thinkest thou this, Twilight Sparkle, that thou hast any right to judge ___Us_? Are We so feeble-minded that such an adjustment would tax ___Our_ intellect? Nay, 'tis incomprehensibly vast."

"Princess, I-I never meant to imply anything of the sort," Twilight stammered, shaking her head vigorously. She bowed again, going so low to the ground that her chin touched the floor, her haunches raised behind her and the muscles of her shoulders stretched out and screaming. Her breath choked her. She should have thought before speaking. This was what happened when you put a stunted social illiterate and a temporally displaced loner together. How was it that they had avoided this when they had first met on Nightmare Night?

And then Luna deflated. When she spoke, her voice was soft and cultured and enchantingly accented.

"Your pink friend was quite right; all in good fun," she drew out the word, stumbling over it with a cheeky smile, "being scared is quite enjoyable, but not half so much as scaring ponies." She winked, her eye flicking off and on like a nightlight. "All in good fun, mind."

Twilight stared up at her, unmoving from her debased position, limbs shaking with strain; her bow was so deep that she could barely find purchase to rise for fear of falling on her face.

"Perhaps I laid it on too thickly," Luna mumbled, tapping her chin with a hoof while looking up and away from the purple pony who struggled to stand up. Her mane assumed a darker hue as if suddenly flushed, and she let out a small chuckle. "Ah, well."

Stumbling to her feet as the princess trotted off towards the reading desk, Twilight finally found words to respond. "For ponies that embody opposing elements, you're very much like your sister."

"I hear that she has developed quite the mischievous streak," Luna said without thought, inspecting the collection of texts atop Twilight's desk.

"Developed? She's always had a playful side." Twilight rolled her shoulders before attending to the princess, moving to stand at attention by her side.

"Not when we were young. We were both quite dour. There was only the harsh fire of the sun and the cold indifference of the moon, ever replacing one another."

"Well you have known her a lot longer than I have." Relationships were such foolish things, really. Twilight had known the princess almost all of her life, and that was a limit approaching zero.

"And yet you know her better than I," the princess assured, kind and inviting, turning to smile at Twilight face to face.

Twilight flicked at the pile of notes that lay on her desk with a hoof-tip. They scattered at the light touch, and she saw Luna narrow her eyes in what the purple unicorn assumed was confusion. The princess' words were a kindness. Social convention dictated that Twilight reciprocate, thus she would not acknowledge the substance, the significance, the implications of what the princess had said. Oh, a younger Twilight would have been very proud of herself indeed.

"So, Princess," Twilight began, her voice clear and sunshiny bright, "how can I help you. Nothing's wrong, I hope."

"Nay, Twilight Sparkle," Luna said. Her leg bent at the knee so that the flat of her hoof lay level before her. "All of my sister's various adversaries remain confined to their respective prisons."

"Well," Twilight said, her voice croaking as she pressed her tongue to her lips, "at least that's something."

"Indeed." Luna produced a somehow regal, dignified, and comical nod. "Though, I suspect that another one will crop up soon enough."

"They do tend to do that, don't they?"

"I cannot imagine what my sister did during my absence without you and the elements," Luna whinnied, and she gave an exaggerated eye roll. "She never could handle problems very well on her own."

"She's Princess Celestia," Twilight stated without waver or hesitation, all humour bleeding from her, replaced with simple sincerity. She stood straight, trying to raise herself to her full, unimpressive height before the towering Alicorn.

"She managed, just like she would if I wasn't here." Her chest swelled, and she nodded to herself. It was foolish to think otherwise.

The Princess of the Night stared into her. Her eyes were strangely slanted, but they took on an air of contemplation that spread out into the rest of her features. Piercing starlight and the blackness of the night shone from her face. Ever since she had been a filly, though she had recognized it as irrational, Twilight had known that the greatest terror of the night was not the darkness, but the starlight that twisted everything it touched. In darkness, there was nothing to see, and everything to imagine. In half-light, the mundane became inspiration for those imaginings; and reading had left Twilight with a marvelous imagination. Terror lay not in that which was invisible, but in what you thought you could see in the scarce light. That was the light that spilled from Luna's eyes and face.

Twilight took a step back and tried to focus on her books, but though the light was still there, something drew her back immediately. For a moment, it seemed that her hair was crawling over her body. When the princess again tapped her chin with a hoof, the feeling was dispelled.

"I think, perhaps, you sell yourself short, Twilight Sparkle."

Twilight cleared her throat and smacked her lips. Her eyes cast about, looking to her books for help.

"In any case," Luna continued before Twilight could think of a suitable reply, "I learned of your presence while presiding over the Night Court, and adjourned simply because I wished to speak with you. I have wondered about the goings-on in Ponyville since my visit."

The purple unicorn restrained a sigh. That was a comfortable enough topic; she didn't need to think.

"But first, I believe that it is proper for me to inquire as to the purpose of your visit to Canterlot."

Twilight's eyes fell once again to her desk, and she returned to her notes, lowering her head and making a vague stabbing gesture with her horn. Her magic bloomed and enveloped the spilled papers, pressing into every millimeter of them with equal force. The collection burst around her, pages expanding outwards to encircle the pair of ponies and rotate around them. Twilight skimmed the notes as they passed. The princess closed ranks with her, joining her by her side to stare at the intricate and grid-line precise diagrams and the inelegant horn-scratchings.

One by one, the papers fell to the table, the pile reforming and reordering.

"I was attending a funeral," Twilight said, her voice distant. She focused on the papers, not the princess. "For a friend," came the afterthought.

"Ah, death. I imagine," Luna stressed the word, and Twilight could not tell if it was intentional, "that it is a difficult thing."

"What do you mean?" Twilight asked, the last of the papers fluttering down into place, allowing her to turn her head to the side and stare into the princess' starry eyes.

"Though I have seen death," the princess began, looking up and away towards the open window above them and the shining moon, "and watched those who have suffered the passing of those whom they loved, I have never lost a being that was close to my heart." Her mane curled and glimmered. There was a living, shifting galaxy in it, in her, that looked far off and small. For a moment, Luna herself seemed the same. The muscles in Twilight's shoulders clenched, and the feeling extended, flowed, into her throat.

"How can that be?" the little purple unicorn asked.

"Before my banishment, I did not speak to my subjects or any others. I even forsook attendants and courtiers, and busied myself with my stars and my night." She paused for breath, and her eyes seemed to burn the little unicorn. "I busied myself with my work. Thus, I never had any pony to lose." The princess picked up a tome from the desk in the grip of her horn and flipping through its pages. "May I ask what sentiment it inspires?"

Twilight felt the princess' eyes on her, rather than the book.

"Well," Twilight began, then paused, then stared into the unblinking princess as she stared into her, and then mulled. The little purple unicorn scratched at a nearly impossible to find itch behind her right ear with a hoof. She wondered how she could possibly explain death to a being who had never experienced loss. Trying to do so would be like explaining color to a mare who had been born blind. It reminded her of a journal of psychology she had once read. One extensive, collaborative article had documented the progress of several young ponies who had been born completely blind due to physical malformation. Medical advances had eventually allowed for corrective surgery when they were still relatively young, while their minds were still developing. All of them were familiar with the words for things, for objects and colors, but none had ever seen anything. Some time after his surgery, after the shock, one colt had looked at a green pen – the first green thing he'd ever seen while lying in his hospital bed, and called it purple; he had thought that green was purple, that green looked like purple sounded, that it really should be purple. Another had said that red was wrong. Red was sweet like a sugar cube, but when he looked at it, when he saw it, it was not. A filly whose name Twilight could not recall was shocked to learn that a pony could see in different directions; she was constantly turning her body to look at things straight on, not moving her head. It was like a divine revelation when she realized that she could see things by moving her eyes themselves. A final colt had to be restrained. Everything was so bright and active. There were so many moving things. There were so many colors, and shapes, and things that were and were wrong. He had begged: "Please, I want to be blind again."

Twilight thought of Sun Bright. She thought of the mark on his flank, a fat smile on the sun. It was obvious, really, why he'd spoken to her, the Sun Princess' student. He had been made to serve, joyfully. Experience and nature pulled him apart. How else could he reveal so much of himself? Or, even if he hadn't, how else could he have revealed so much of what he thought he was?

"I don't think that I can," she said. "It's like friendship. You can't understand without living it; you can't know the feel of it. It takes field work."

"It is all but unfathomable, then, if it is in any way akin to friendship," Luna replied. Her mane and wings contracted, and her whole body turned a shade darker, black seeping into her blue coat. When she stepped over to the balcony door, putting her back to Twilight, the unicorn could see the sky and the stars beyond.

Twilight took a tentative step forward. Her eye twitched. She took another, and then the princess spoke, halting her advance with a start.

"It shall indeed be a most interesting day when I lose my sister. Whatever our rivalries or differences, she has been with me so very long."

Twilight almost went straight for her bookshelves. The muscles of her upper legs budged out with the effort of restraining her hooves, and she saw the princess stare for a moment, her face creased, studious, and ever so slightly adorable. There was an ache deep in the purple pony's alicorn, and her hooves itched for something to hold. Her private library of books spun through her mind, and she considered authors and titles and contents. Every book in the collection was known to her, and it would have taken her only moments to pull out a text, point out a passage, and tell the princess that her fear was ridiculous.

"No disrespect intended," Twilight began, saddling up beside the Princess of the Night, "but that doesn't make any sense. The princess is immortal. You'll never lose her." Her voice was thick with conviction. The sound of it, even distorted, heard with her own ears, was clear to Twilight.

"Is that what history records; the dictates of doctrine?" Luna asked without turning away from the door, the glass, and the night sky. Her face again held some of its terrifying light. "Before my fall, I had never thought to ask."

"It's not just doctrine; it's the truth." Twilight shuddered, her spine prickling under flesh. "Greatest Glory proved over two thousand years ago that because Princess Celestia gives the light of life to all ponies, just as the sun provides light to plants, she can never die. I could bring out my copy of his collected works to show you his reasoning in full."

"Did he argue that?" Luna inquired, her voice dripping with incredulity. She rolled her eyes with a scoff, and everything about her seemed to grow slightly larger. "Hidden in the night sky, I once watched him speak. He was always such an arrogant little foal. His parents set him off on the wrong hoof with a name like that, I think."

"So he was wrong?"

"Quite wrong. Of all the beings on this word, only I am immortal."

"But wouldn't that would mean that you are in some way more powerful than Celestia?" Never looking away from the princess, Twilight reached out with her magic, her horn sparking with dull light, and passed over her desk with telekinetic fingers. A quill rose up, and after dipping itself in the ink, flew across a virgin sheet of note paper.

"Indeed," Luna affirmed, straightening herself while at the same time also appearing to relax even further. She was flippant, but Twilight felt as if there was something off about the incongruous rigidness of her spine, the swirling stars in her mane, and the hairs along her back that seemed to waver and rise. "We do surpass our sister's might."

"How can that be? The sun produces almost four times ten to the twenty-six joules per second of power, and the moon is just a rock. Everything that it does is just a reflection of a greater power." Twilight gaped and jammed a hoof to her mouth. "Oh I'm so sorry, Princess," she mumbled from behind the sole of her foot. "I didn't mean to insult you. Please don't take offense."

The princess laughed. It echoed half hollow in the large room.

"Think nothing of it, Twilight Sparkle. As to your objection, despite the moniker I adopted after my fall, as you know, I do not simply rule the moon. I am Mistress of the Night and of all the stars of the sky. Ask yourself this: if I were weaker than Celestia, why did she employ the Elements when banishing me? Could she not have simply overpowered me?"

"I never asked. I just assumed... I don't know what I assumed." Twilight moaned, her legs shuddered underneath her, and her nonstop scribbling died away. The quill fell, leaving an ink splatter on the page where it lay. Twilight's face and heart burned with shame. "Oh, that's not very studious of me. I should have thought to ask."

"So you have never considered my sister's true fate, then?" Luna asked, her eyes and her head shifting. "The sun is just as mortal as any pony. It has burned for untold eons, and will yet burn even longer, but fire consumes, and as anything that eats and lives needs must do, it will die. When it and all of my stars have burned out, mine shall be the night eternal."

Twilight scraped over her horn with a hoof, parting her mane. She drew in a deep breath and tasted the cool air. "If I accept that even the princess is mortal, how is that possible? You said that everything that lives must die."

"How do you know that I am alive?" Luna asked, her voice strangely pitched. She flicked the side of her muzzle with the tip of her wing, as if brushing away dirt.

The purple Unicorn frowned before clearing her throat.

"Well," Twilight chest puffed up, "you are able to assimilate, metabolize, and maintain a stable internal environment," she said, raising her hoof in the air to punctuate each stated requirement with emphatic gesticulations. "You grow, respond to outside stimuli, and, insofar as I understand it, are capable of reproduction." Twilight stopped, fumbling as her hoof fell to scrape the floor; her eyes followed, trying in vain.

"I mean, I think you are," she finished in a mumble.

Princess Luna grinned, her eyes closing up like shutters, an expression Twilight only saw when she started, looking up and about frantically.

"That's not to say that I think about it!" she added hastily, her eyes wild and her head and hoof shaking back and forth in a rapid motion of placation. The movement stopped abruptly, and she shut her eyes while muttering, " I-I mean, I have. But only out of scientific curiosity."

"I would expect nothing less from my sister's prized pupil," Luna said. Her voice was soft in Twilight's ears. The princess shuffled closer to her, giving her a gentle nudge with a wing. "She would not have chosen you for that honor if you were not curious by nature."

"Thank you, Princess," Twilight said in a sigh that caused her entire body to slump.

"You're quite welcome, Twilight Sparkle, but it was not a compliment; it is a fact. In any case, yes, by all your criteria, I am alive. Even by the last." It was Luna's turn to pause. Her mouth opened several times, as if her mind was getting off to several false starts. A soft, uncertain noise rumbled in the back of her throat.

"Well, by all of your criteria some of the time," she said finally. "It would take too long to explain, and is quite beside the point, for I was not thinking of physical processes."

"Oh," Twilight said before letting out a nervous chuckle and rubbing her shoulder with a hoof. "Well, I've never been too good with things that I can't measure or otherwise test objectively. Signaling and self-sustaining processes that serve as indicators of biological life are good enough for me."

"Indeed?" Luna replied, moving over to the nearby bed, leaping up with a flair of her wings. The bed accepted her as if she weighed no more than a moonbeam. With a flick of her hoof, she beckoned Twilight over to her. "Tell me, have you heard of Crying Judgment?"

Twilight tried, and failed, to raise a single eyebrow before settling, dissatisfied, on raising them together.

"She was a Unicorn who was born about six hundred years before the founding of Equestria." Then reaching the bed, Twilight threw out her forehooves onto the red comforter. She hefted her body weight, the thin muscles over her shoulders straining to hold her, dangling legs kicking out for a moment, scrabbling over the edge. She raised herself up. As she plopped her rump down a respectable distance from the princess, she saw that Luna was allowing her a moment to compose herself before continuing.

"June eighteenth, six hundred and thirty-four BE, actually," Luna corrected offhand as Twilight settled, shifting against the sheets, trying to find a comfortable position, before giving up, curling up her legs and lying out straight. "Go on. What can you tell me about her?"

"Princess, if I may, I don't understand what this has to do with anything."

"Have some faith, Twilight Sparkle," Luna admonished, a look of mingled amusement and reproach flashing by so quickly that Twilight was only half certain that she hadn't imagined it. "It should become clear soon enough."

Twilight's chest heaved out a sigh of long sufferance. She recognized the princess' tone, though it hid itself well behind her cultured, so-ancient-as-to-be-foreign accent. Similar words could have spilled from Celestia herself in her flowing, gentle, and harmonious voice. The purple mare could recall a dozen instances where she had posed a question to her beloved teacher regarding some element of history, spellcraft, philosophy, or science and had met with that tone, eventually being directed to the answer in some roundabout way. Celestia had always had the answer, but would never simply give it away. At least, she would not do so at first. It was as if she had wanted Twilight to work for it, even if only a little, either to come upon the solution herself or to earn the right to be told outright.

It was only as Twilight cleared her throat in preparation that she wondered if, should pouring over her books and those of the various libraries at hoof failed to satisfy her, Celestia might be willing to help her again.

"According to manuscripts recovered from ruins excavated in the Unicornia rises, Crying Judgment was Empress of the Unicorn Kingdom for almost seventy years," Twilight began, recognizing that she was about to fall into a state which her friends often described with the terms "lecture" or "boring." "Those documents indicate that Crying Judgment presided over the most prosperous, and most violent, period of the Unicorn nation's history. Archaeological evidence from the ruins of the Unicorn Kingdom's capital city substantiates the claim that she had remarkably good fortune, and the histories of the Earth Pony and Pegesus nations agree that Crying Judgment led several successful campaigns against them. Many theories regarding her accomplishments, which deal primarily with and international influences like the expansion of the Hart Coalition, have been proposed, but I'd need to do some real research to comment on them."

Twilight stopped, perking up, and ignoring the somewhat unimpressed look on the princess' face, telekinetically grasped a pen from her writing desk to jot down a note, "Possible Research Topic: compile theories regarding success of Crying Judgment's expansionist policies– assess credibility." Though she could not see her hornwritting, it appeared perfectly legible, if somewhat dull and inelegant. It was no different from the rest of her notes.

"And what of her biography?" Luna asked, slouching over on her side.

Twilight deflated, the sudden excitement regarding possible future research disappearing in a flash, and she gave the princess a lopsided grin, her eyes shifting about, desperate to focus on the walls, the floor, or the ceiling, anything but the Alicorn whom she had failed due to her lack of knowledge.

"Well, uh- I can't go into any real detail beyond what I've already said. I haven't studied her enough, unless, of course, you mean the physical biography written during her lifetime: the book."

"I do." Luna nodded.

"Well, we don't have access to the biography itself; we assume all copies of it were lost during the reign of her grandson, Divine Protection, in the partial destruction of the capital city. From what later sources record, Crying Judgment commissioned the biography. In complete contradiction to the established facts, it presented her as a peacemaker whose expansion was due to her matchless wit and charisma, and her unprecedented magical ability. Whole cities would defect to her when confronted by her beauty and wisdom. While we can't know for certain whether anypony at the time believed any of it, I find it doubtful, and modern scholarship puts no stock in what it purportedly recorded."

"In this context, you've made an important distinction," Luna began while pointing to a stack of books that lay on the floor before the bed "between what is believed in the moment and what history records, what is written and what is remembered."

"I fail to see how that's any more meaningful or important here than anywhere else," Twilight said, lowering her head so that it hung off the edge of the bed and looking down to the stack of texts, following the princess' hoof. As a reader, she had already learned that beliefs were often rather flighty, while the wisdom of good books was sure and steadfast, but when they failed, and she knew that there were superfluous failures, there were conflicts, omissions, and deceptions.

"You may know this truth, but I wonder if you understand it."

Twilight's face crinkled up at the words and the tone which was now quite unlike any that her teacher had ever used. She held her tongue by pressing it to her teeth, and then she sucked them. The princess had been kind enough to forgive her bumbling, all of her insults. It behooved her to do likewise.

"The biography of Judgment was not meant for the ponies of her time. Rather, it was meant for the future. My sister and I watched from on high, having for a time been forgotten and replaced by idols, as Judgment used all her considerable power and influence to destroy any other histories of her life and conquests, so that only her version of events would remain. In time, that would be all that pony-kind would remember."

"That would have been impossible," Twilight said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I don't think that any pony has that kind of power."

"Quite so. The greatest tyrant may commission her own biography, and dictate that which her history will record, but even that passes away. Every pony is the principle actor in her own life's tale, yet no pony, be she Goddess or commoner, can write it. The biography as she understood it is always forgotten. Her brutality and the act of commissioning forever remind us that she was the insecure tyrant, afraid of history and the judgment of generations yet to come." Luna shifted and splayed her legs out to the side, twisting so that her haunches faced away from the little pony. Twilight stared at the princess in her rather lackadaisical pose; she had never noticed before that the highest line of the crescent moon on the princess' upper thigh curled around the edge of a thick muscle that rippled as she arranged herself, and that the three black splotches below the moon were splashed over dimples, as if somepony had poured ink over the princess, the viscous pigment oozing and running down her fine, supple legs to pool in the divots without otherwise staining her immaculate blue coat.

"Everything, every event, depends on those generations for connection," Luna continued, brushing by Twilight's back with her long wing. The unicorn wondered for a moment if the princess had paused or if her scientific examination of the goddess had lasted for but a second.

"She acted out the events, and those who come after her form the plot. In doing so, they write the true story and give it meaning; they are her authors. They endow her life with meaning." The princess rested her head down, smiling. The soft lines of her face seemed to bleed into the candlelit half-darkness around her, but the red comforter highlighted her strong jaw that worked as she worried her lips and then spoke.

"No pony can write the story of their life, Twilight Sparkle. An autobiography is a lie, rife with failures of memory and intention. Only those who come after can provide the meaning that is remembered, the only meaning that remains and matters."

The shadows cast by Twilight's candles and the thin starlight that shone through the windows and from the princess's mane pressed in on the unicorn. She saw it, and she felt it. They stretched out when the Alicorn at her side grew dim.

"And a meaningless life," Luna said almost wistfully with an odd, faraway smile, "is a contradiction in terms."

Another breeze came in through the window, and Twilight shuddered. She wondered why she had opened it. There was smoke in the air again, carried in by the wind. She could only just detect the scent. She thought of hearths and fires, of families gathered together in the night, of little foals curled up with their mothers and fathers, nightmares chased away by warm bodies and steady heartbeats and soft words. She thought of the darkness and shadow that gripped her, and somehow, though it made no rational sense and thus galled her, she didn't feel quite so cold.

There were Night Guards in the corridors beyond her room, patrolling the castle and defending it against the whatever lurked out in the dark of the night, intending harm. She knew it, though she no longer had the patrol routes memorized, as evidenced by her failure to avoid detection when she tried to sneak into the palace libraries and had, instead, set off a time loop. Thinking about that episode was not at all conducive to sanity. Still, she knew the guards were out there, and it was such a strange idea, really, that the castle needed defending. What could challenge a pair of goddesses, and what was there in the night that would defy its mistress?

"It seems to me that your theory depends on us viewing lives as narratives, like storybooks," Twilight said. She reached down to tap at a storybook that had fallen from a nearby pile and now lay open on the floor. It had told the tale of a lover King and his pursuit of a wife. Though Twilight had not cared for the romance – indeed, it had detracted from her experience of the book – the King had also been a scholar; the author had fused wisdom literature with poetry, a love story, and the medieval, chivalric romance. She had appreciated the resulting novel for its attempt to instruct while providing enjoyment. Poetry and instruction together was like coating bitter medicine with honey.

"One thing has to lead to another so that we can find meaning, but really there's no coherence; one thing ___doesn't_ follow another. We don't look for connections or continuity. It's not natural for us to put things in that kind of order, unless we're actually writing a biography or an autobiography, to see them from that perspective."

"Possibly," Luna began. She tilted her hoof out flat in a gesture of acquiescence. The bed creaked underneath her when she shook back and forth, hunkering down slightly. "But mortals remember and read what they wish to from lives lost. Do you not remember ponies for what they have done? As if the purpose of their lives was the winning of a war, the liberation of the oppressed, or the uncovering of a scientific principle? Do you not read their characters and judge them? And you determine the criteria by which they are judged."

"But there are untold generations that no pony remembers, and generations yet to come who'll be forgotten just the same," Twilight said. That was the very point, after all. Like the sun and the moon, there was a cycle, and no pony could escape it. In the same way, no pony could escape the failure of memory.

"You are quite right, Twilight Sparkle. And there shall come a final night when no generations remain. More important, then, is ___my_perspective," Luna said, pressing her nose into the bed, her voice muffled by the sheets. Twilight swallowed as the princess' chest rose and fell. "I will live long enough to see the beginning and the end. Before the sun or the stars burned, the world began in darkness, and it will end in darkness. The night was, and it will be. Like you, what with your treatises submitted to the Ministry of Magic, when the day's final end arrives, I will be a prolific author and a librarian. I will be the only one left to remember and to write. There will be none to do so for me."

"I've never thought of it like that, though I have seen a comparison between books and the lives of ponies." Twilight rubbed her forehooves together. The grinding noise almost caused her to flinch. "All of our lives, we compile thoughts and knowledge, like words on a page, and at the end we finish writing down everything that we've learned. There is a tragedy about losing a book. Normally it's not a problem. There are multiple copies of most books, but here there is only one in the entire world. Even if all the knowledge is recorded in different books, all the marginalia that a dozen authors over a hundred years have compiled disappears."

"I must say that your cynicism surprises me, Twilight Sparkle," Luna said, raising her head to reveal her half-lidded eyes, but she shuffled closer to the unicorn, much to Twilight's surprise, rather than drawing away. "The materialistic perspective of death has been shared by innumerable ponies throughout the ages, though that is a rather fanciful, and somewhat convoluted, way of explaining a fairly simple concept."

There was a pressure between the purple pony's eyes. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat. It was only now that the princess' scent filled her nose, a thing that was too much the smell of the night to be the smell of the night, distilled, pure. She hadn't detected it before.

"Well, books can be used as part of a metaphor to better explain anything. I've proven it," Twilight said with a self-assured nod, trying to dispel the sensation in her forehead desperately, "with science."

"Indeed?" Luna's lips formed into a smirk that caused Twilight to tighten up her shoulders and hips, clenching her legs into her body.

"I must have missed that particular article." The princess ribbed her with a knee. "I'll be sure to visit the Ministry in the near future. The method must have been fascinating."

"I admit," Twilight began, rolling her head and her eyes towards the corner of the room, "that I had never considered the implications of an immortal being remembering us, but it doesn't really matter."

"No?"

"Even if I granted your position about life and immortality, everything I knew or thought would still be lost. The actions are there." She twirled her hoof around in front of her, and she could see Luna's eyes tracking the movement. "But the motivations are just filled in parts of a fiction. Somepony else would be living on in that story, not me. Even if were to explain myself and my thoughts, to be a coauthor, the project would still be a failure."

Luna nodded sagely, her mane wavering, growing, and shrinking, rather than moving with her head.

"You would follow after the example of Crying Judgment."

"It's not just that, Princess," Twilight insisted. "Ignoring Crying Judgment and failures of authorship, it doesn't matter if I filled in the details for you. Time destroys memories. Ink fades. One day you won't remember this conversation or the story, let alone my thoughts and feelings. My self. And this doesn't even address the issue of all the tens of millions of ponies whom you haven't known. They won't even be remembered at all."

The princess furled her legs up underneath herself before pushing off the bed. She rolled her spine and stretched out each of her limb, shaking and limbering them.

"Would you allow me to show you something, Twilight? It should answer your objection."

"Of course, Princess. I'm always ready to learn," Twilight replied as she hopped down to the ground, carefully avoiding her precious books.

Whiteness bled into the princess' eyes until they swam like pools of milk, thick with fat. Her hooves braced themselves on the floor as she leaned in, coming into contact with Twilight, brushing the tips of their horns against one another. Twilight shuddered as the milk of the princess' eyes seemed to catch fire. It extended outwards, burrowing into her flesh and striking deep into her mind. A sense of horrible, wrongful displacement of flesh, of being impaled without any hint of pain, washed over the purple unicorn. It was sensation masked by an anesthetic, something that should have hurt, wounded the spirit, but did not.

She felt her eyelids sag closed, though her well-trained eye-muscles fought back with all their might. The world behind them was not black, but pure white, and Twilight Sparkle fell asleep in the space between heartbeats.


	4. My Song in the Night

Twilight regained consciousness without the sense of actually awakening or any memory of ever having fallen asleep. There was the impossible sense that she had always been as she was now, or that she had never fallen asleep at all. She had just taken a step forward. What she did remember was the light, and then she saw it once more from behind her eyelids. She lost her grip on what she assumed to be the floor. It fell out from under her and she scrambled about, her desperate hooves searching out something onto which they could hold. Despite the light that drilled into her eyes, she forced them open, glancing around. Pure white absence pulsed before her, somehow both nonexistent and active. There was a sudden lurch followed by a prolonged sensation of weightlessness. It obliterated her appreciation of directions. In the whiteness, things that were and were not there flew past, falling or rising she could not tell because there was no such thing as up or down. It was worse than that; from her perspective, up and down seemed not to even exist. The things were unfamiliar shapes or indistinct non-forms, she could not tell which.

But there was one clear constant in the transitory realm, a soft beat that reverberated deep inside her and in the whiteness beyond. It was only after minutes, the sound growing steadily all the while, that she realized that she had not breathed since she'd opened her eyes. She tried to draw in air, only to find that there was no atmosphere. There was no air, and she screamed wordlessly, noiselessly. The pulse grew inside her and out though no medium existed to carry it.

Her wild legs tore and kicked at the emptiness for a few moments longer before she gritted her teeth, resolve passing over her features despite the fact that she tried to shut out the sound and the sights by closing her eyes and stopping up her ears. It did nothing to help; the sound overpowered her. It was beyond stopping, but she clamped down on her scream and her terror. However, with the alien sound still booming on unabated, ignoring her as if she had done nothing, was nothing, she could only squash down her feelings. Even she, with her prodigious intellect, hadn't the strength to analyze her situation rationally in the face of the inexorable pounding.

When the sense of direction returned, when direction itself returned, without any warning, Twilight found that her curiosity overcame the deep, instinctual terror that welled up within her to the point of overflowing at the terrible pounding. It was not her courage, her spirit, or her rational mind that allowed her to assess her surroundings. It was simply a need to know that was as deep as the fear.

Black space stretched out forever, starless. She saw, and what she saw could not be described in words. It had no rational form to describe. There was no way to compartmentalize it, to break it down.

It was more than simple matter, a simple accumulation of descriptions and parts. Seeing a mortal horror wounded the soul, but this was something else entirely.

It was like having her eyes held open with barbed wire and being forced to watch an atrocity, a score of ponies being violated, being broken, with the universe itself having taken their place. No, it was not like that. It _was_ being forced to watch as the universe was violated. She could see the beings in the darkness that all at once seemed to writhe, seethe, gibber, ooze, scream, and laugh, though they could never do such rational, describable, mortal things. What they did was a billion other things for which there were no words, because such things did not, could not, exists. They could not exist!

And that was only the basest approximation of what they were and what they did, for none of them could be understood. Some blasphemous form of apophasis was the only means of attempting to describe their nature and their ever shifting forms, and even that would, in the end, only fail to capture them.

They were not alive. They were not dead. They were not speaking, singing, or playing, despite the drumbeat pounding, but they were not silent. They were not mad. What was madness? They were not matter, and they were not spirit.

There was only one affirmative thing that could, perhaps, be said: they were unnameable. And that was wrong. They were unthinkable. In the face of them, Twilight could not even begin to understand what that statement meant. They left her without words, or associations, or courage.

After only a brief glimpse, she again shut her eyes against them. It did nothing. She could still see them, not with her memory, but through the laughable shield of her own flesh. And why not? She could hear though there was no air.

Her frantic hooves flew to her face, digging, scrapping, and she pulped her eyes, not feeling the rivers of flesh and blood that squeezed out from under her hooves, ran down her legs, sticking in her coat, and dripped from her, though there was no gravity to pull it down and away. Ichor stuck to her hooves, for at the sight of _them_, her eyes had become wounds. There was no air for her to hear them burst. Was there pain? She could not tell as she kept clawing. For all she knew, there could have been pleasure, given the mental agony of what she saw – and agony was too small a word.

It could have been pleasure given the mental agony of what she still saw, not with her memory, but with the ruin of what had once been her eyes. If she could have thought, she would have realized how foolish it had been to hope, to believe irrationally in the face of the obvious, that she could blind herself to them; to think that she needed eyes to see. It was so trite, but she couldn't begin to think it.

There was no reason here; none to be seen; none to be heard; none to be made; none to be employed.

And then they were gone, wiped away by brightly burning stars that burst behind her eyes. She gasped at sight itself, taking in air that was cool and moist and fulfilling as it inflated her lungs. It was then that she realized, her hooves falling away from her face, that she had eyes, healthy and whole. The light of the stars that flowed from within her eyes, not from without, revealed her unstained hooves and legs.

Blackness consumed her, but it was a cocoon, safe and pillowy. The temperature rose, changing from something that she only now realized had been non-existent to a pleasant summer warmth.

She sighed into the night. Wrapping her legs around her chest, pressing in on herself and intensifying the heat that enveloped and ran through her, she felt the hairs of her coat mingle, each one brushing, snagging, or tugging, sending off pleasant sparks through the nerves in her skin. Her coat was soft.

Looking back on what she had experienced, her dread now somehow removed from her like terror experienced in a dream, the heat, the softness, and the press of her legs were the first things she had felt. There had been no physical sensations of pain or pleasure during her journey, and it all seemed almost silly.

Ground was underneath her now, and she could not remember when it had appeared, as if it had always been there. A carpet of thick grass spread out, welcoming, tickling at her lower belly to entice her to unfurl her legs and splay herself out, or to roll through it and scratch her back.

Wind pressed into her face, stirring up the scents of the soil and the moist grass, wonderfully alive. The blackness was no longer a solid mass, but an intricate pattern of lines that flowed in three dimensions, set aflutter by the breeze, tickling her cheeks and nose. It drew away from her, opening up to her the sight of a field at night.

Turning her eyes upward, Twilight found Luna laying by her side, settling her coalesced wings. They flared, flapped twice, and fluttered gently into place, tucked up along her back.

Breathless, but pleasantly so, Twilight examined her surroundings. Stars littered the sky, and their light caused her coat and face and flesh to heat. They illuminated the field, the world pulsing with an ethereal glow. In its center, almost twenty feet from her, sat an oak tree whose limbs twisted high into the sky, aching to touch the stars. Under its thick canopy lazed another pair of ponies, each wholly consumed with the other. They stroked each other, pressing together as if they wanted nothing more than to consume and be consumed. They nuzzled their cheeks together.

The field of grass, the sky, and the light of the stars all stretched out forever, unbroken and, Twilight somehow knew, unbreakable. Then she saw the princess, the whole princess, and focused on her inflamed eyes.

"I am sorry," Luna said, barely audible over the strange, out-of-place waver in her voice. "I am so very sorry, Twilight Sparkle. I have done you a grievous wrong."

Twilight's face fell to the ground, and she burrowed her snout into the grass. She needed to feel more of it, to let it consume her, and she could not look. The blades of grass stroked her muzzle and tickled her lips as she spoke.

"Princess, what happened?"

Luna laid her chin atop the unicorn's head, just behind the horn. There was an intimacy that caused Twilight to stiffen, despite the fact that it did not seem in any way untoward.

"It is so small a thing, but, again, I am sorry, Twilight Sparkle," Luna replied slowly. Her jaw moved as she worked out the words, pressing her chin into the thin film of flesh and hair that separated the princess from Twilight's skull. It was rough, harsh, and pleasant, as if she was massaging the purple unicorn's scalp. The unicorn did not draw away.

"I misjudged the strength of your mind and your magic. You have seen something which was not meant to be viewed by a mortal."

"So that was my fault?" Twilight inquired, her voice and her lips quavering.

"No! Do not even entertain the thought," the princess exclaimed authoritatively, pulling away, almost frantic. "The fault was my own. It is simply that your mind ever reaches out to the limits of understanding, testing the boundaries of knowledge, yours and ponykind's."

A gentle breeze, something that Twilight could feel but not with her flesh, something which she knew was not wind, caught the princess' mane. The radiant matter whipped up, fanning out above the two ponies so that it spread out into the sky, mingling and blurring with the night. All the host of stars darkened in the expanse of space that was her hair. As her mane grew and extended, the pony herself seemed to deflate, being dwarfed by her power and the dulling sky. Sensations, the grass against her belly and the cool air, and the sight of the distant ponies suddenly seemed bleak, washed out.

"This quality, your power, and the nature of this place led you to an outer realm to see beyond into a higher space," the princess explained. "What you saw was a dream and a vision conjured by a man who had seen, and understood, too much.

"Man?"

"I am the mistress of all the dreams in the world, not of all the dreams in all the worlds," Luna said. Twilight tasted the air on her tongue, smelled the far off scent of flowers she hadn't detected before, and felt the dew soak up into her coat. The other ponies around her, the princess and the lovers, bloomed bright and glowed. She could see every hair in their coats.

"However, things from far off places, if strong enough, have drifted from their master's grip and come to me," Luna concluded.

"Are you legitimizing the so-called many worlds theory?" Twilight asked, jerking her snout upwards into the princess' face. Luna attempted to withdraw at the sudden movement. It was an exercise in futility.

The princess' suggestion opened up a multiverse of possibilities for scientific and magical research, and the purple unicorn thrilled at the thought. But more than that, she saw the red around the princess' eyes, glassy sea, and the red inside of those eyes. Twilight's head lolled down. _Her_ eyes stung.

"How then can we define decoherence?" Twilight asked, shooting back up and pressing closer to the Alicorn. "Are dreams unique in this formulation, or can substantial forms be transmitted?"

Luna placed a hoof against the encroaching unicorn's chest. Never before had the princess of the Night been so readily overpowered. The little unicorn leaned forward, unimpeded by the insignificant force against her chest, and the princess set off into a series of blinks, casting her eyes about with a strange, lopsided grin splattered across her face.

"W-well, it is only-"

"Who is this master of dreams, and does he serve an analogous role in this other universe?"

"He reflects a-"

"Oh! Is he another version of you – my that would be very strange – or does he have a separate existence or are you reflections of the same pan-universal form?"

"That is relati-"

"I shouldn't assume he's a he," Twilight continued. "But the latter would accord with theory of the immaterial body."

"What popp-"

"But how could that dimension exist if there are infinite worlds?" She smacked a hoof to her head.

"Well, duh, Twilight, it's functionally infinite. I don't know what I was thinking. I mean I- wait. Wait," she commanded, shoving that same hoof in the princess's face, a remarkable feat given how far she had already invaded Luna's personal space.

"We'll deal with that later. I think we've gotten off topic," Twilight finished.

"That," the Moon Princess laughed, pawing at her eyes, "is very wise, Twilight Sparkle."

"So, where are we then?" Twilight gestured to the pair of ponies snuggling under the lone tree, and couldn't help but feel as if she had just solved one of Princess Celestia's most devious test questions. A young Twilight had always reveled in the praise she had received after unraveling one of the princess' challenges. Though she had almost always felt that the accolades were undeserved, nothing could have stopped her from flushing with mingled embarrassment and pride.

"We are in a dream, Twilight Sparkle," the princess said. Her wings shuddered at Twilight's side, agitated.

The purple pony held back a snort at the answer and the double lack of understanding. It was obvious to her that they were in a dream. She had been looking for something a little more elucidating than that. In the time it took her to form that thought into something she could actually say to the princess without causing offense, Luna had already begun speaking.

"The male under the tree dreamed of this for many years, even for decades when it was impossible."

"Can they see us? Are we part of the dream?" Twilight focused on them, shifting her attention away from the Alicorn. It was rather improper, given the circumstances, but wholly justified by the demands of scientific inquiry. They were intimate, but not _intimate_. Somehow that was just as bad.

"There is nothing there to see us. This is merely a dream for his life. It is a record and a manifestation of all he wanted: to love and be loved by his Winsome Meadow. There is no mind at work here. I felt that such a simple place, a wholesome dream, would be most welcome given where we've just been."

"Thank you, Princess." She dug her hoof into the ground before her, grass and earth foaming up to envelope the tip, carving out a rut. Around them were the sounds of night, air, and breathing.

"That was very considerate," Twilight said at last. Her nose itched; she sniffed and rubbed at it with a foreleg.

"Dreams each have their own cadence and tone," the princess explained. Twilight felt as if she could see the calculating intellect at work, struggling, behind the princess's eyes.

"They have as much in common with music as anything else. You may have found it strange that what you experienced in your nightmare has left no lasting impression, and that you should so easily feel at peace here. It is because some dreams are readily forgotten, and the peace of this place, its harmony, already resonates within you."

Already Twilight was turning to research. Notes and questions engraved themselves in her mind, yet it seemed obvious that many dreams would simply seem to disappear with the daybreak.

"So you record ponies' dreams?"

"No. Not really. In this realm, mine, they live forever." Her wing stretched out and away to sweep across the sky that was at the same moment that very wing, the feathers and the air whistling and ruffling. "Allow me to show you more," she said, extending a hoof.

Twilight smiled up at the princess, her heart swelling at the prospect. Cool air was again welcome in her lungs though it stung and bit as if she had run a race and been winded. But she was not yet done, had barely started along the path. With a nod, she stood. There was a pleasant stretching sensation that shot through her hips and ran into her legs, and she reached out to Luna, joining their hooves together.

And then they were in the air where there was no air. The little moral pony could no longer breathe, but it was alright. She did not need to breathe. They flew through living darkness that glittered like polished onyx, and she could feel sensations, hearts and minds made physical, brushing by her in their flight. Colors and shapes formed and dissolved all around as the pair moved forward without moving, skirting the edges of dark wells where things she saw and yet could not see flitted about. The world was snowflake obsidian, busts of light and feeling fracturing the blackness, leaving behind spiderweb cracks that the traveling ponies themselves then left behind them.

They peered into and passed night terrors: little foals tearing through thick underbrush and being torn apart by low hanging branches as they fled from that illusive something that they knew was behind them in the starlit forest. Twilight choked at the sight of their cowering, and their wailing, and their tears. They were never actually caught, but knew that they were, that there was no possibility of escape. The princess looked ashamed, but said that there was nothing to be done. Painful dreams faded with the coming of the dawn, and there was no harm done, no suffering. Twilight didn't understand that, but she had experienced it for herself after arriving in the meadow. The voice was clear, through there was no air, and unlike the earlier drumbeat, the impossible sound eased Twilight's pain.

They traveled through other forests where colors seemed more vibrant than in reality, but were, at the same time, soft and welcoming. Animals trundled about, unafraid, and a pack of timber wolves lay asleep in a grove beside a flock of grazing sheep. Twilight was certain that, out of the corner of her eye, she had caught sight of a familiar, butter-yellow pegasus.

There were grown up stallions showing up naked to school or work, appearing without their bow-ties or vests. Droves of similarly naked ponies pointed and laughed. Twilight thought that it was a rather odd nightmare to have, all things considered.

There was a scene of war, of fire being lobbed into the sky while battlements crumbled and a single valiant pony stood against a tide and then fell. She had no idea how, but Twilight knew that he was the one who had dreamed this world into existence, and that, somehow, it was a good dream.

There were explosions, fireworks of light, and laughter, and passion. Twilight blushed at the sights, some far more intimate, far more explicit, than the first, and Princess Luna laughed at her squirming.

There was a swell of voyeuristic shame, but the need to see and to know and to experience was too strong a master for Twilight to disobey. Then Luna, somehow sensing her thoughts, told her to take heart and that there was no wrongdoing on her part; she was the guest of the Princess of Dreams.

Then there were sick things. Twilight turned away. The pair passed quickly.

Moments of exaltation and defeat, love and hatred rippled around them as the delved deeper. Twilight knew that they were going farther into something, but had no idea what that something was.

Rainbow Dash burst through blue skies leading a flight of pegasi who couldn't keep up with her, and Twilight knew that she didn't care because it didn't matter. The prismatic pony pierced the clouds and the heavens themselves, executing arcs, high-speed figure-eights, and fantastic, stomach-churning downward spirals, setting off sonic rainbooms throughout. Her entourage followed after her, flaring out along each explosion as if they were being carried out by the wave; they were just there as accents to the real show. Twilight couldn't help but think that the distinctive blues and golds of the Wonderbolts hugged Rainbow Dash's athletic figure as if she had been poured into their costume, molded to fit into it.

The princess allowed her to linger, to watch the pure joy and freedom with a smile, and then they moved on, though once they left, Twilight cast a look over her shoulder in the darkness, trying to keep the vision in view. She couldn't see anything. The dream was gone.

A prolonged period of darkness followed in which the cracks of light seemed almost to die away, breaking down until they no longer existed. The black had eaten them up. Tiny eddies and currents rose up and tossed Twilight about, but the princess seemed unfazed. Twilight watched her as they flew. Her unwavering eyes looked ahead, and strange marks, lines of concentration and of power, crossed her face.

There was another flare of desire, but this time Twilight did not see it; she felt it. It seized her, and she felt the tug, the inexorable pull that in this realm was physical. It was a feeling that was inside her and out, a pull that was a work in her and at work on her. Her gaze passed from the princess, following the feeling to the field of black space to her right. A gargantuan ball of light burst into being, its flare so intense that the little unicorn could almost feel the need to close her eyes against it, though there was no way for the glare to blind her in this realm.

The princess slowed, her great wings flaring out like the light and like the darkness that surrounded them as if they were fighting against wind. Twilight could sense it in the same way that she could sense that she was the cause. The light was pulling her, and she was pulling away from the darkness. That light caressed her skin as if her coat was not even there. It touched her directly, rather than warming her coat and then her flesh, or ruffling her hairs like the wind, triggering the nerve endings at the roots, in the flesh in which they were buried. The princess turned back to look at her, her face grim, eyes narrowed dangerously and lips pursed, though Twilight could only see it vaguely, her focus diverted.

"Can we go into that dream?" Twilight asked, pointing towards the great burst of light in the distance. The fact that she could speak without air was not at all off-putting.

Luna's eyes grazed over Twilight's body and then along her outstretched limb to follow her gaze. The Princess of the Night immediately turned to look away, but her face remained unchanged; there was a no expression of surprise or understanding.

"Nay, we cannot," she responded, shaking her head.

"Why? This is your realm, isn't it?" Twilight flailed her hoofs in the darkness, trying to turn herself to face the princess. Finally, she huffed and abandoned the attempt. Her head drooped.

"I... earlier I misspoke. There are some dreams that are beyond me," Luna said with a snarl. If the darkness had not been so complete, Twilight would never have been able to see the flash of the princess's bared teeth, and the sound could have easily been nothing more than this realm distorting her voice.

"That seems impossible. What dreams could possibly defy you?"

Luna's head twisted, almost disappearing into the night that defied the light cast by the distant orb. Her body shook. She smiled, and Twilight thought of Sun Bright again.

"I think, Twilight Sparkle, that the answer to that is obvious."

Twilight looked into the brightly burning light, eyes tracing over the flares and ejections and explosions that seemed to run through its surface. It was strange to think of light as having a surface, she knew, but she could see it; she could see it moving. She ran her tongue over the soft, prickly hairs underneath her lower lip. Her head bobbed. Luna's exhalation, though she was not breathing, was loud at her side.

"There's really no way I can get into it?" she asked, the light's pull concentrating in her chest.

"I never said that." Luna's leg swiped out an arc in front of her.

"Actually princess," Twilight said, her voice cracking with incredulity and uncertainty, "that's exactly what you said."

"No, Twilight Sparkle. I said that we could not enter it; I never said that you could not." Luna seemed to recline on her back, though she was aligned with Twilight, using solid darkness as a support for her back, settling herself.

"How can I get in, when you can't?" Twilight asked. Fire burst out of the sphere and rose out into the infinite blackness beyond. She watched it, twisted at an angle, so that it appeared to her that the ejection was horizontal.

"I imagine that you'll see that when you enter." She stabbed her chin in the direction of the light, a gesture Twilight took as somehow dismissive. The large pony seemed to have become fascinated by her hooves, scraping them together. A purple haze consumed her horn, and it then surrounded those hooves. They moved back and forth, manipulating the glow as if it had the consistency of bread dough.

"Is it dangerous?"

"Dreams are always dangerous," Luna said tentatively, moving her hooves far apart and snapping the band of energy, "but they can only cause harm if you allow them to do so. I have faith that you will not."

"How will I find my way back?" Twilight asked.

The darkness that traced around Luna's horn bloomed outwards, snuffing out the light of her magic. A strange field of power gripped Twilight's mid-section, tinting her coat as the princess crossed her forelegs. Her head folded down towards her chest, and Twilight could just make out the movement of her silent lips, though her attention was focused on the growing pressure on her ribcage. At the moment when the force grew unpleasant enough for Twilight to voice her concern, it vanished, leaving behind only a vague sense of heaviness around her middle, as if she'd eaten too much pie. The space around them returned to its natural state.

Luna, her expression dull, looked up at Twilight. "Though I cannot follow you, you can now reach me. When you are done, think of this weight. It will draw you back to me."

Twilight stared into the light with a grimace.

"Once there, you will have no difficulty traveling," Luna assured with a hint of concealed gentleness, the night melding with the wing that reached out to stroke along Twilight's back, the touch and the feathers light. Somehow, the princess had moved to her side without her realizing it.

"Forgive me, princess, but it seems hard to believe that when you say you've never been there."

"Have some faith, Twilight Sparkle," Luna admonished. "Even here, I cannot see into your heart, but I have assurance in that which I cannot see." She leaned her head down to Twilight's level, though she could have just as easily floated downwards, leaving her hooves to dangle below Twilight's own. Lowering her head emphasized their pronounced difference in height, Twilight noted, instead of bringing them onto an even plane.

The unicorn barely had a chance to nod before she felt the princess release her. She hadn't even noticed that she was being held, but now the absence was obvious.

Her vision of the princess grew cloudy as she drew away, as they moved apart. It was like looking into the darkness from the light. That was the terrifying thing about the light, especially during the night. A little pony, alone for the night, her negligent parents off on business or making merry with friends, would go around the house, turning on all the lights so that even the shadows where the monsters might hide would be chased away. Doors to rooms would be locked up, creating another barrier against the impenetrable darkness of closets and hideaways underneath beds. Sitting there in the brightly-lit living room, she would curl up with a book or a game or her toys and she would enjoy herself. Reading or playing would absorb her, make her forget all about her absent parents or the dangers that lurked in the dark. She would laugh, and send her toys scattering, and imagine taking part in all her stories about heroes and dragons and princesses, imagine herself in a world where each of them had their role and each of them always fulfilled it. The ending was a place of safety when the outcome was already known.

Then she would look up and out through the windows and see nothing. No. It wasn't that she could see nothing. Rather the night beyond and the light inside turned the glass into a mirror. She could see herself, stare into her own eyes. Just behind those eyes could be anything, even another set of eyes wearing her reflected image like a mask. She could be staring _something _in the face and not even know it. The light that made her safe, made her obvious. She couldn't see out. Everything could see in. It wasn't the same as starlight, not quite; it wasn't a matter of twisted, inspired imagination. Yet it was the same. It was a fear of the light. The light was what put that little filly in danger. The light stole away her sight, her ability to see anything that mattered.

The princess withdrew from the light and Twilight moved away from her; by mutual agreement they parted. A third party added its silent voice, creating a harmony.

When she reached the light, she managed to flip herself around through a conjunction of her horn's magic and her desire to see. Her back turned to the princess, she brushed her forehoof over the surface of the light. For some reason, she had expected it to ripple like water. It cracked. The shards licked at the underside of her hoof. Their tongues bit like steel, like glass sinking into welcoming flesh that opened its arms wide for generosity's sake, in giving and in taking. It was completely illogical, but she sighed at the sensation that was not sensation, her face and jaw falling slack, untroubled.

And then she was inside without ever having moved, the light welcoming her as her flesh had welcomed it. That feeling lingered a while before she spiraled downwards, though her sense of direction left her. It was really becoming rather frustrating.

Again, arrival was sudden. A revolting burst of sight caused Twilight to swallow back her vomit, the acidic sting lingering long in the recesses of her throat. Here, she could feel. The great globe, the planet that held griffons and ponies and dragons and manicores and all manner of chaotic and harmonious beings hung in the sky. Equestria's sun was breaking just around the edge of slight, casting light onto Luna's moon in the distance.

She was in space, still being drawn forward by a force, felt but unseen. It dragged her past that moon, over and across the vast mountain ranges that made up the mare in the moon. Luna herself had left them there during her imprisonment, a signed promise of return so that no pony would ever forget. Obviously, it hadn't worked.

Twilight fell through space, leaving the moon behind, and then plummeted through the atmosphere of the world. It did nothing to her. Here she could feel, but there was nothing to feel outside of herself.

The pressure dragging her forward eased, though her belly sagged and clenched. She pressed a hoof to it and felt the rumble shake up through her leg. For a moment, she worried that her focus would drag her out of the dream, as Luna had said. Her fall ended without an impact of any kind, despite her speed. The ground accepted her, though the grass around her burst into flames when she landed, carving out a ring of scorched earth.

And she looked and saw a canyon cut through the ground before her. A great cloud of smoke rose into the air as from a thousand watch fires and cut off the sun from the earth. Shadows spread out along the earth. But the sun burned bright, cutting down through the encroaching darkness of the smoke. Then, it seemed to strain, flickering in the sky, and the smoke cleared away, blown away by wind.

Stars were now visible, despite the day's growing, painful light. They shot through the sky and crashed against the sun, bursting noiselessly. Indentations in the sun formed, its surface deforming and popping back into place with each explosion. There were great ejections of flame. All this Twilight saw in perfect detail, though it was nonsensical. The sun was so large.

Rising into the sky came the moon, and it lorded over all the stars. They clustered around the Mare in the Moon, acknowledging her and worshiping slavishly before cracking through the sky with redoubled force towards the sun. The greater light raised a defense, its somehow visible-without-blinding corona expanding and batting away the stars that rained down upon it.

But the stars were beyond number; none could count them, and the darkness of the smoke and the space beyond earthly sight pressed in on the sun. More long shadows rolled over the earth, growing ever larger with each passing moment, blanketing towns, fields, mountains, and valleys.

The moon grew large, its radiance pressing down like a miasmia. The lesser light, now the greater, moved through the sky, hurtling after the stars that even now rocked the sun. Fire gushed outwards; solar flares so large as to be visible from earth burst from the sun the moment the moon touched its surface, though that was impossible, as everything was. Slowly, slowly, the moon covered over the sun, cracking with fissures, somehow growing brighter as the sun dimmed.

The sun was an extension of Celestia. It was as much her as was her physical body. Lines of mystical connection yoked the princess to the celestial orb. They were ever in dialogue, always speaking and reacting to one another. They were joined, sisters with one mind, one heart, one soul, and a shared pair of bodies. At least that was what Twilight had read.

The fiery, exploding, nuclear, life-giving sun was disappearing. The princess was being eaten alive. And then she was, and she was not, for she was gone. Night had fallen.

All around her, Twilight saw an impossible time-lapse photography world. Years passed by in moments when she looked to the left, and days moved like seconds to her right.

Grass and trees and crops grew sick and withered, not because it was inevitable, but because something wished them to die in the darkness and the terrifying light of the moon, the fiery beams that shone from the Mare in the Moon's eyes so that she could watch the world.

The Griffins tore each other apart quickly. Atop the Arimaspian Mount, food was more precious than their beloved gold. The strong took and horded what they could until enough of the weak banded together. Then, when the strong were gone, the weak turned on themselves.

Dragons entered torpor for lack of heat and food, wasting away over centuries until even their gargantuan forms appeared pitiable and frail. They who had been kings, demi-gods older than Equestria, were nothing in the face of the night. The mightiest of all the mortal creatures in the world had fallen.

They were lucky. They were unconscious, asleep. It was their nature, their response to deprivation. They died without ever knowing it.

The ponies banded together against the darkness, standing defiant, facing down the eternal night. They shared and cooperated and saved what they could for the frail, the sick, the old, and the young. Mothers and fathers wasted away while their children begged for more food that they could not provide, their rations dwindling.

For a time, they made a good show of it, but in the end, when the grass and the trees died and all the stockpiles ran out, the show had no actors willing to play their parts.

Emaciated ponies scrounged through the dirt, the ruble and the remains of what once had been. They fought and scraped and clawed at each other. Earth ponies beat and broke the generally more delicate pegasi and unicorns whose vaunted magic sputtered out from the weakness of physical bodies no longer capable of channeling their power.

Something refused to allow Twilight to look away. It was inside and outside of herself, the universe, and the dream, all at once.

In the darkness, color faded from the world, not just from sight but from ponies. Color oozed like puss from a wound, leaving their once vibrant coats dull parodies of what had once been. Everything was a dull parody, a joke. The stars laughed. The mare in the moon grinned.

But the most terrible thing, the thing that was sick beyond all else, was that no pony died. One faded purple unicorn whom Twilight could not recognize just barely managed to raise up a rock from the ground and sink it deep into the skull of an earth pony just about to set into a stolen meal, a pittance, but the largest feast either had seen in longer than they could remember. Twilight knew this, but did not know how. The earth pony whimpered. Its traitorous, twitching body refused to rise. The unicorn ate.

Ponies that were too weak to move struggled to breathe, each intake of air too painful to survive, but they never ran out of strength to keep breathing. Their chests shuddered and continued shuddering even as the world around them crumbled into dust.

They were never living, always starving, always dying, never dead.

And the sun screamed. Twilight could hear it in the distance as she looked up to the cold moon. It screamed and it begged and it pleaded. It cried. But the eyes at its heart that Twilight knew were there but could not see, the eyes were dry. At the core, in the heat, tears couldn't be shed or last even for a moment. Strange that the dream should follow that logic and so little else, Twilight thought as the screams, fast as light, rang in her ears carried over the gulf of space.

Twilight put her nose to the dust and wept. She could hear it all, for the moon allowed her, wanted her, to hear. It wanted every ever-living pony to hear.

There were threats of bitter retribution, of a fire and a torment that would last until the death of the last star and beyond, enduring long after reason dictated that it could no longer burn, its fuel consumed. For hate's sake, the sun could live forever. Its incoherent anger beat down on the world and the moon and the night that would not listen. Rage led into begging and bargained, a promise to submit itself to any punishment or revenge imaginable, to debase itself, worshiping the moon as if it were its god. It would give its life. Then, it tried to appeal to the best qualities of the night, to its kindness. The moon too provided light, for it was not without care or pity, and all the stars in the sky painted beautiful portraits for all the little mortals. Surely, the sun reasoned, the night could find it within itself to relent, to not punish anyone else for the day's failures.

The stars grinned, shining bright, and the indifferent moon rolled through the sky, unheeding.

And the sensation about Twilight's waist and in her stomach tightened like a screw, drilling into her belly. Around her, all things blurred and burst into colorful swirls. Lingering as she left, the sounds of the light and the sun chased after her.

She popped into being in the night, rejected by the dream and the light so quickly that she might have teleported back to the princess's side. The Alicorn was resting comfortably, inverted in space and still lying on what appeared to be solid darkness. Her expression was placid.

Twilight rolled her shoulders and clenched the muscles between them, savoring the tension. She could feel her tears on her face, soaking down into the hair under her eyes, though the dream had ended. It was gone. It was itself dead. Yet dreams could cause lasting harm if a pony allowed them the power.

When Twilight caught the princess's eyes, the disaffected Alicorn started and twisted in space, coming around to face Twilight directly.

"Are you alright, Twilight Sparkle?" Luna asked, flapping her wings as if trying to stay in the air and reaching out a hoof towards the little unicorn.

"Did you know what was in there?" Twilight responded with a question, the uncontrollable shuddering that rocked her body flowing into her voice.

"I could only imagine," the princess replied. She raised her chin at the vibrant dream in the distance. "I can only imagine."

They rested there awhile, the princess watching the light and Twilight watching her. Occasionally, Luna would turn back to the unicorn, but she would never comment on Twilight's state.

"I think we should go," Twilight said at last, barely audible. She cured her legs close to her body. Her face was set tight. An attempt at a lack of expression always ended up looking forced, pitiful.

The princess smiled with only half her lips, half her face, and half her heart. In this place, again, Twilight could feel it.

They moved on, traveling through illuminated darkness, though that was another strange impossibility. Dawn was coming. Light and wakefulness glowed just on the horizon. The two ponies passed into a great radiant sphere, entered the final dream, and Twilight saw herself standing, mute and still, in her room before the Princess of the Night.

And then she started awake to find herself looking up at that princess whose blinking eyelids mopped up the milk spilled in her eyes. Color bled back into them, and for a moment it was like looking at the antithesis of the first nightmare.

Battling against the fog in her mind and the strange sea-sick feeling of shifting perspective, of seeking herself from the outside at one moment and then seeing the outside from herself, Twilight opened her mouth to speak. No words came, only a croak; her throat clenched in sleep paralysis.

"Be at peace, Twilight Sparkle. It will pass," Luna said, touching her horn to the little unicorn. Her tone was soothing, a lullaby, and Twilight felt her body and her throat relax instinctively.

"The dreams that I have shown you so far are not being experienced now, Twilight. They are the remnants of dreams that live on in my kingdom," Luna said, her wing reaching out to touch Twilight's neck and cheek. The near pain in the unicorn's throat began to ease.

"Do you see now, Twilight Sparkle? You are powerful and have learned much, becoming wise in many ways in which I am foolish, but you are not an Alicorn and you do not understand. My memory is as eternal as I. I remember everything, every sight or sound, every breath, every word, and every slight. And I am the mistress of dreams, those conjured by the sleeping mind," she said, reaching out at shoulder level to tap the top of Twilight's head.

"And those that rest in the heart," she finished, sliding her gentle hoof down the side of Twilight's face to press into the fur over the purple pony's chest. "When I enter my realm I may see them with perfect clarity, from aspirations, to nightmares, to the lost, called back into being in the depths of the night. Some special dreams live on in both, and they are oftentimes the most beautiful, or..." Her face lost all its softness. "Or they are the most horrible."

Twilight withdrew from the princess, the sensation on and in her chest strange and not wholly pleasant. There was a look that passed over the princess' face which very nearly caused Twilight to wince. She ignored it as best she could, though the princess herself withdrew to the door that lead out to the balcony. A light twitch, a half wink to clear away a sting in her eye, shot across Twilight's face, and she began to pace, her tail flicking about, restless, looking for all the world like it was batting away flies. Pausing for a moment, she raised a hoof and gestured for Luna to continue, before resuming her walk.

"Ponies are the stuff out of which dreams are made, and dreams form ponies. All short, mortal life is surrounded by an eternal sleep. So when life and this whole world fade away into pure dream, I will be there to rule them and remember them."

"If-" Twilight croaked, the word falling like gravel out of her mouth. Her pacing ceased. She cleared her throat, pressing her foreleg to her mouth for politeness' sake, and coughed several times, each one slightly louder than the last. Then she began again.

"If all this is true, why didn't we know about this already?" She rubbed the space above her breastbone and breathed in, filling her lungs to capacity.

"Why hasn't this been codified, explained, theorized? Philosophers would give a hoof and a leg to hear this kind of thing straight from the horse's mouth." Twilight grunted at Luna's smirk, pursing her lips as her head fell below the level of her body. "So to speak."

"It is because I denied this power long ago," Luna said. "Ponies aspirations of love and companionship were terrible to me, and in the face of the falling sun, there were night terrors inspired by the dark. By my dark and my person." Luna stopped and looked up to the clear moon that lay in the sky, visible out of Twilight's window. A lump built in the little unicorn's throat, a new tension, and she swallowed it down. To her, the princess was ethereal, almost fading under the sharp moonlight, fragile nearly to the point of breaking, celestial and beyond a mortal; her face was painfully young and terrifyingly old.

"Because my subjects were afraid of me, I was afraid of their dreams. I know now that some worshiped me, but there were very few, and I long since stopped trying. I was so afraid of customary rejection, that I didn't even see that some had accepted me. It was only after I learned, after I met you, that I came to read dreams."

She smiled a soft smile and lowered her head to look to the floor, darkness in her cheeks and light in her eyes.

"Your instruction gave unto me a new spirit," Luna said. Visible, nearly palpable, joy and grief mingled in her features. "It freed me from the captivity of fear. I am no longer a slave to it."

"Princess, I- thank you, but I can't have been that much of a help. I'm just a librarian and a student. If you'd gone to her, Princess Celestia would have helped you." A stern expression etched itself into her face. She nodded more to herself than the Alicorn before her. "And she did. Whatever I did, I was just reciting my lessons. It was all because of her."

There was an almost visible exhalation, a bloom of breath from Luna's nose. Her jaw clenched, the fine muscles along her cheek tightening, flesh folding in on itself to give the Lunar Goddess a pinched look. She leveled her leg with her body, throwing out her hoof.

"No matter! We have forgotten our lesson." Her voice was suddenly loud and boisterous; it resonated and thundered, swallowing up all other noises into itself. It consumed the sounds of the night. The Lunar Princess wiped at her cheeks, hiding a flush from Twilight's view that the little unicorn barely noticed.

"Oh!" Twilight exclaimed. A sheet of paper flew from her desk, followed by her quill and ink, all held in the unicorn's mystic grasp. The sharp quill-tip submerged in the ink. After withdrawing it, Twilight began scribbling down her notes. Soft scratches of pen on paper were heartwarming, and the smell of wet ink as it soaked in caused her nostrils to flair.

The scent of ink was always comforting, conjuring fond memories. This time, it reminded Twilight of study sessions with the princess, and of childhood exams, and of more than perfect marks on those exams (she had answered the bonus questions correctly, her instructors would say to a beaming Twilight who shuddered with barely contained energy and excitement, ignoring the other students and the glares that she only later came to recognize as envious), and of her many A pluses, pinned up in places of honor for all to see, and of kisses on her brow for successes, but more than anything it reminded her of Princess Celestia's smile. It was the sun. She couldn't remember the faces of her parents ever looking like that, or looking like anything after a test. She couldn't remember.

"Then is this the conclusion: somepony who lives forever can never have meaning; there is no pony to give it to her. And I have come to understand that I will never die because I have been given the task of remembering all ponies and all their dreams," Luna said, and pointed out to the night sky beyond the balcony. The stars cold light seemed to curl towards its mistress, bending and refracting. Twilight watched the princess as through water, bent.

"I may not remember the events of their lives, but I will remember their dreams. I do not know if they are more than that, but I believe that it is enough. All their stories will rise up into the eternal night, just as all they are and do descend from their dreams," Luna said. She was a reflection in the warped glass of a funhouse mirror, and Twilight felt her hair stand on end, in part because of the cool breeze that swept in through her windows.

"Won't that be terrible for you?" Twilight asked. "Nightmare Moon rose because you were lonely, because you were shunned, and you're talking about living forever alone."

"The final night holds no terror for me." Luna shook her head almost pitiably, her eyes falling like shooting stars. "It is mine. The darkness is peaceful rest, and comfort gentle is the cold. It will not be pleasant, but neither will it be unbearable."

She smiled, deliberate and slow, showing her teeth, and leaned towards the little purple pony.

"Do not pity me, Twilight Sparkle. This is but one easy yoke, one light burden, borne for my subjects."

"All this seems rather elaborate," Twilight said, looking down and away to her paper to scribbling another note to which she gave all her visible focus. She had to. "I find it hard to accept that you only came to believe all of this recently, after Nightmare Night in Ponyville."

"It was there that I experienced an epiphany. However, it is true that I began to think on some of these things while I was imprisoned. But..." she trailed off, breathing out audibly and scraping a hoof along the back of her neck. "But it is like friendship."

Twilight smiled despite herself at the princess' words.

"My time in Ponyville allowed me to progress beyond disjointed, rudimentary thinking. It allowed for coherence, understanding."

Skimming the notes she had already taken, Twilight picked out words and phrases and quotations. She needed the proper combination to think and to write. The three objects in her mystic grasp hovered before her. She submerged her quill tip in the inkwell, and then brought it to her note-paper. The quill, dripping a splotch of new ink on the paper, went to a fresh, empty space, and began to flow across the page. Twilight had almost never simply asked a question in class. When they arose in the course of a lecture, she had generally written them out in her notes so she could make the wording precise, avoid any embarrassments, and read them out. She had never done so with Princess Celestia, though, and she realized that this was the first time she was doing it with the Princess of the Night. She had feared embarrassment in lectures. Until now, her questions for the two princesses had been part of conversations.

"If you were thinking about this on the moon, it seems to me that you-" she stopped abruptly, her tongue freezing and forcing her to consider her words further, though she had already chosen them. She bit the rebelling flesh in her mouth, wincing at the crushing impact of her teeth, and continued without further interruption.

"It seems to me that you would have mellowed somewhat because there was a groundwork for peaceful reconciliation. Why did you come back as Nightmare Moon?"

"I returned seeking vengeance," Luna began, the darkness around her growing and lapping at her hooves, stroking upwards and contending with the light of her mane that fought it down, "because jealousy endures as does the night."

Twilight gazed at the ink on her paper and then the ink around the princess' legs, the flesh just above and below her little purple nose crinkling.

"Given that we've just been speaking about your immortality, it sounds like you're saying that you're still jealous of your sister."

"The night and the day must ever be jealous," Luna affirmed with a wave at the moon. "If not, the sun and the moon would never seek to rise over the other, to cast their opposite from the sky, and to rule again. The very enactment of our co-monarchy would be impossible without inherent jealousy."

"It certainly didn't seem that way when Nightmare Moon was defeated."

"Ah, yes," Luna drawled, turning away. Her muzzle pressed into the glass of the balcony door. Hot puffs of breath left a rhythmically expanding and contracting circle of condensation. The condensation was breathing, in and out, opposite her, filling with heat and growing large as Luna expelled air and deflated.

"Tell me, do you recall that my appearance was quite different then?" the princess asked.

"Of course; you had a physical mane, your coat was a different shade, and you were much smaller," Twilight said, counting the items off with shakes of a hoof. "I had assumed that it was because you had temporarily lost your power."

"And you were right. It was a moment of unprecedented weakness in many ways." Luna placed her hoof on the glass before her. When she withdrew, she left a hoofprint in the small patch of condensed wate. It was now little more than a ring circling a smudge. "I could still hear the stars, but I could not control them."

"Are you saying that your nature was fundamentally different?" Twilight asked in a soft, somehow reassuring tone even though she posed a question, stepping closer to the princess before thinking better of it. Her personal relationship with Princess Celestia and the firsthand observation of her power at work had sparked Twilight's natural fascination and curiosity. For years she had studied texts on Alicorns and their qualities, though she had never had the spirit to approach her mentor directly with personal questions on that one issue. According to what she knew, even if Luna had been somehow reduced, she would still have been an Alicorn. There were precious few things that could possibly change her fundamental nature; there were a few precious things more powerful than an Alicorn.

"I do not believe so, but at best, what happened was a rare celestial event. I doubt if it is to be repeated." Luna breathed onto door once again and then traced down with the tip of her hoof, cutting the circle into two parts. The light shining through the glass made them seem to glow like two foggy half moons, facing each other.

"That seems a matter of choice, not a factor of your nature, or of Princess Celesita's, but either way, based on what I know of the Elements of Harmony, I don't think that it really matters," Twilight replied. She pressed a hoof to her chest and felt the Element of Magic inside her, not the weapon, the crown, the physical manifestation, but that special piece of it which always lay within. It welled up, and the line of power from her horn seemed to burn into her chest, traveling through her throat.

"I saw how you and the princess were that day, and she wasn't any different," Twilight finished.

"It was not necessary that she be different." Luna wiped away the two half moons that were fading before her, hoof squeaking along the glass. "We almost immediately returned to our natural state; contention remained as it must."

"But Equestria is based on the principles of harmony, something that opposes jealousy."

Luna's chin rose, and Twilight saw and felt that the princess was watching her from the bottom of her eyes.

"In that light, there is a time for everything: summer and winter, grief and joy shared with those you care for, construction of the new and destruction of the old, sowing and reaping, night and day. They don't conquer." Twilight leaned backwards onto her rump and drew her forehooves together with a clop. "They balance. Each one has its time, and each one knows it."

Luna shook her head, and tapped at the glass door before her.

"You have fallen prey to the greatest lie of our philosophy, a lie that has endured for untold ages. My sister and I, the sun and the moon, do not fit your ideal of harmony." The Alicorn ran her hoof through her starry mane, pulling it outwards. When she withdrew, strands of sticky amorphous radiance, not of hair, clung to the retreating appendage, grasping it tight before inevitably falling away.

"It was at the point of our greatest disharmony, at the point where my jealousy waxed and reached its apex, that Celestia was able to use the Elements. In that moment, there was open conflict between us. Jealousy and that conflict must not be at odds with the Elements; they have no bearing on the relationship between the sun and the moon. Those celestial spheres are not part of harmony; they seek to overcome."

"I can't agree. The true magic of friendship is, well, love." Something tickled her over Twilight's breast bone. She scratched at her chest, but the feeling was too deep. "The magic of friendship endures broken trust, failures of loyalty. It survives the good times and the bad, when you change your laughter to mourning and your joy becomes gloom. In times of famine or poverty, when there's nothing left to give, and generosity is impossible, friendship doesn't disappear. If you aren't thinking and you hurt your friend, if you're mean to them, you can make amends because there's something more than kindness there. And no lie can diminish the honesty of a friendship. Behind everything else, there's love. That's what rules friendship; that's what creates everything else, and that's what endures when everything else is gone. Without it, there's nothing, and to believe otherwise is just faith in a nightmare. "

"Now your idealism surprises me and it betrays the direction of your current research." Luna said, her tone flippant, waiving the pony off. "I'm sure that the Ministry of Magic will receive a paper on this soon, just as I am certain that Cadence would be quite pleased to hear what you have said. Yet I fail to see how it matters." Her majestic wings flared outwards, a single molting feather shaking off and floating to the ground, and the light of her stars and mane and moon reflected off each line and curve inside her wings. The flashes and sparkles were blinking, death-blind, white eyes, a thousand of them, all locked into her plumage. Twilight's itch faded.

"A god's love is a jealous love," Luna said. "It can be nothing else, for it allows no other. A god will not be second in her people's eyes. A god will not allow distraction. A god ever longs for and demands love undivided. Thus while my sister and I care for one another, in our own way, we must always be adversaries. It is our nature."

Twilight squeezed her eyelids together, pressing her brain for the unifying principles of friendship.

"You mentioned Princess Cadence. Maybe we should consider her for a moment," Twilight began. "Even if she's is only a faux-Alicorn, she embodies love, and there's no jealousy there. She has no opposite number, and there is no replacement. If jealousy was an inseparable part of love, even the love of an Alicorn, we would see some reflection of that in her."

The princess worked her jaw, and Twilight could see her lips bulge as she passed her tongue over her front teeth. Her tail concentrated and flicked about, whip-like. Luna stroked the throat and underside of her chin with a hoof.

"And there's more," Twilight pressed and waited a moment longer for Luna to process and respond. Despite her prodding, nothing came from the Princess of the Night. The little unicorn planted her hoof to a book on the floor lightly, the soft leather cover – the book was obviously a very special one, she noted absently – offering comfortable resistance to the pressure. There was a pang that shot through her body, and she realized that she had to proceed with her argument.

"I can't believe that jealousy is an inseparable part of any love. It's not eternal or inevitable. You became Nightmare Moon because you were jealous of the princess; Nightmare Moon was a creature of pure jealousy," Twilight said. "Celestia didn't use the Elements to banish her. She used them to save all of the ponies in the world. She thought of ponykind, not of the conflict."

A blank, unreadable look, just at the verge of splitting apart, slowly crawled across the Luna's face, but the nightmare light of the stars was there again, chastising. Twilight brought her hoof up to wipe at her eyes, and she felt hot breath ruffle her trim feathering. She swallowed, sensing something thick and dry pass down, steeled herself and set her face to the princess, the same face that had confronted Discord and Nightmare Moon.

"And together my friends and I used the Elements of Harmony to destroy Nightmare Moon utterly. There was no relationship between losing your power and being freed from jealousy, other than that they were both caused by the same thing, the Elements," Twilight said with a blossoming, studious frown to cover the a sick feeling that rose up. Just as it was climbing towards its peak, the princess broke and it disappeared entirely. Luna's eyes opened wide. Though she still stared forward, her head suddenly withdrew.

The unicorn continued, "If magic is the keystone for friendship and the Elements, then that tells me that love conquers jealousy, not that they are inseparable. Even if you're right that jealousy is fundamental to what you are, then the Element of Magic can transform our nature; make us something new."

When she finished and stared into the princess, into her eyes, Twilight was immediately certain that the calculating mind was at work again. She knew it by physical sight, by the flaring sense of invisible magic, and by blind instinct. That impression only grew stronger when the shining stars of the princess' mane seemed to congregate near her scalp as if they sought to murmur secrets in her ears. Twilight looked away and scanned her vast library of books. The princess, she realized, did not have a response at hoof.

Luna's face contorted as if she were sick unto death and she looked to the stars as if she was conversing with them, and not Twilight. The little unicorn saw it out of the corner of her eye.

Then the lunar Goddess turned her face unto the wall and said, "Prithee, Twilight, allow me to meet thee again at daybreak. The stars told me... some time ago that the Night Court is fit to be recalled. I would set the moondial back ten degrees this night so that I might converse with you further, but we all have our cup to drink. Princess though I may be, my subjects must be served."

Twilight immediately extended outwards with her magic, not noticing for a moment the archaic terms which had crept into the princess' speech. Unseen waves of power lapped at the Princess of the Night like the tide on the beach, slow and inexorable, Twilight's aura spilling out into the room. Luna shivered, but Twilight didn't notice. A golden pocket watch bust into being before the unicorn. The unicorn stared at it, her face and jaw growing slack.

"Oh, Princess Luna, I'm so sorry!" Twilight exclaimed, and she slammed her hoof to the floor while the watch disappeared in a flash of purple. Unlike her earlier, accidental violence, this felt good, as did the shock that rolled its way up her leg. It felt deserved. "I didn't realize how early it was. I've wasted so much of your time," she moaned.

"I've made you..." her head shot up, her pupils constricting, "late," she finished, the pitch of her voice rising to the point of cracking. She grimaced as she tossed her quill and paper to her desk and cast her eyes around the room, frantically searching for something, she knew not what. There was nothing to do save suffer from the curse of relativity, and she knew it, yet she felt as if it should have been otherwise. There was always _something_ to be done, a pony just had to think of it. This sort of thing was the very reason she adored checklists; when she knew what to do and when, she wouldn't waste any time.

"It is quite alright, Twilight Sparkle," Luna said, her voice again assuming the soothing quality of a lullaby, and she made a placating gesture with her hoof. Twilight eased.

"Sorry, Princess." The purple unicorn rubbed her forehead, a distinctly abashed look settling over her face.

"It is nothing," Luna replied, stepping forward to pat the unicorn on her shoulder. Twilight let out a breath at the sight of the princess' eyes and their softness.

"We shall share a repast and speak further," the princess continued with dramatic flares of her voice, wings, and hair. "I assure you that it shall be delightful. I have instructed the chefs in the preparation of delicacies unseen since my era. It will be-" she smiled and reached out to Twilight with an open wing, the tip extended flat, "the most wonderful of mornings, my idealistic, young pony."

"I look forward to it, Princess," said Twilight. Given the mixture of feelings and sensations she had experienced this night, she surprised herself by how much she actually meant the reply which social convention demanded of her. It was pure, and it sounded out in her voice.

Luna nodded as if there was nothing more to be said, or that could be said, her mane bursting around her, and the bent light of the stars and moon twisted further. It and she wavered; glass that had been stuck a blow and shaken. Light sizzled around Luna's horn, the heat of it causing Twilight to groan under her breath as if it was the sun under which ponies basked on summer days.

And then Luna began to fade like a dream or a spirit. From a scientific perspective, the process was fascinating, as it was quite unlike the standard unicorn method of teleportation. When moving about, Twilight simply popped out of existence; she did not phase out of being. The little purple unicorn did not notice, her notes forgotten. Somehow, though it was not a thought but an instinctual sensation buried deep in her gut and heart, at the moment it seemed wrong to study, to appreciate, the princess and her manifold magic from a scientific perspective.

Twilight licked her lips and then waved awkwardly, entirely uncertain what to do with her hooves. The princess made no reply other than simply dispelling like a cloud of smoke carried away by the wind, leaving nothing behind.

Twilight's hoof fell to the floor, and she cast her eyes about her conspiratorially, like there was someone watching and she had been caught doing something forbidden. She took in a long, calming breath. The princess, she thought now that she had a moment of private reflection, was wiser than she had suspected. Realizing how she had taken up so much of the princess' time had caused Twilight to lose hold of their conversation, being overcome by her neurotic obsession over time, her personal failures and impositions, forcing a postponement. She was improving, at least. She recognized what had happened after the fact, even if she had been powerless to identify it and stop herself in the moment.

The notes and her writing utensils drifted over to her table. A snort sent her head and mane shaking and flying, and she trotted after her things. Her magic bloomed and plucked a book from a far off shelf without the unicorn even looking. The glowing purple text flew towards her, illuminating a swath of the floor as it whizzed along and leaving the hint of a mystic trail along the floor that faded away after only a few seconds, not unlike the princess and her teleporting body.

The book froze above Twilight, jerking to a halt without any visible deceleration; the glow of her magic extended outward for a moment even after the object itself had stopped, carried forward by a mystic momentum that defied the laws of optics. She let the text fall to the table and then let it fall again, opening it up. Her hoof traced over the author's name: _Greatest Glory_. She did not need to touch the book; her horn would turn the pages and take down notes, but she _needed_ to touch it.

After brushing around the edges of the page, the hoof withdrew, coming to rest by her side, and the page flipped over in her horn's mystic grip.

Twilight Sparkle began to read.


	5. The Day is Yours, and the Night Also

Only on rare occasions did sleep come easily to Princess Celestia. Resting, let alone sleeping, had grown more difficult since Nightmare Moon's rebellion; there was something distinctly unsettling about surrendering herself. She could never escape from the sense that keeping her eyes open was the only thing that prevented the sun from falling from the sky eternally. If she faltered and rested for a moment, no pony would ever open his or her eyes to the dawn again. So the wearisome nights dragged on, and her days passed swiftly.

She grew weary from the load of care she bore, and in turn she grew ashamed. It was impossible to compare the royal tasks assigned to her and her ponies' labors. Their days were all hard service, and they longed for deserved rest. What right did she have to both desire and fear sleep? Though Luna had returned, it often still eluded the Princess of the Day. But it was no harm, she knew, for neither goddess actually needed rest.

Celestia had taken to wandering the hallways of her palace, following the twisting passageways that led to forgotten corners, basements, and rooms unused for decades. It was better than tossing and turning until dawn. Most nights, she stopped on the palace terraces or in the observatories to look out at the night sky, or paused before stain-glass windows in the hallways to watch the light of the stars and the moon as it filtered through. No matter the angle or location from which she viewed the night sky, however, the night had been bland. Her night had been bland. The stars had always been dim, and the moon was ever cloudy. For a thousand years, the night had been dead.

It could not have been otherwise, Celestia knew. She was the dayspring that brought light to darkness and the shadow; she could banish the terror of the night, but not bring life to it.

Celestia's night was much the same as any other over the past thousand years, but the sights had changed since her sister's return. The Princess of the Day ambled through one of the well-used sections of her castle, acknowledging the night-guards she passed, all of whom bowed low in obeisance, with a nod and a smile. The illusion spell cast over them that gave rise to their slanted eyes, ebony coats, and membranous wings prickled her eyes, but the illusion itself caused her nostrils to flare involuntarily and set her wings twitching. The night guards were aliens in a land of soft-bodied, soft-countenanced, and soft-hearted beings. They were hard, monochromatic, and angular, and their eyes betrayed a cold, unequine soul. They were not part of her kingdom, but they were still her ponies, and she loved all of her little ones. She did. She couldn't simply judge a book by its cover.

What inanity. A book's cover provided the title. It supplied the contents. It presented blurbs of description. It illuminated the text to follow with images to match its contents. It wrote a contract between parties. It named its author. She snorted.

Struck by the sound, a nearby night guard grimaced, and he leaned towards her, his spine growing visibly ridged. She waved him off with a wing that was all gentle curves and a harmony of perfectly groomed, pure white feathers that merged and flowed together. She left the guard and his pointed edges behind.

One of the palace's turrets obscured the distant moon, but the stars were out, distant, small and clear, like fragments of her sun, detonated to litter the sky. They twisted in seemingly random directions but their haphazard organization always seemed to lead naturally into patterns of animals, weapons, and myths. The other known planets in the system rolled by with a luster greater than that of the stars themselves. Mortal ponies had discovered them, but Luna had known their names before they had been born from the cloud of dust that had swirled and ignited into the Equestrian sun. Nebulae were visible in the night, seemingly covering large patches of stars, but the haze did not obscure them; it intensified their fire, as if tinting their white light into an intense gold. Twilight had always loved the stars, and Princess Celestia wondered if she should head to the observatories. Perhaps, she thought, she would find her student there. The purple pony had arrived earlier in the day to carry out some personal business, Celestia knew, though her faithful student had not informed her of its nature.

Celestia flared her wings, stretching them out to the ceiling, and smiled at the satisfying sensation before she trotted down an adjacent, starlit hallway.

Minutes later, after rounding a corner and passing through an archway, she came upon a pair of ponies, sitting together in a far off in the shadows. Furthest away, tucked into a corner, was a conspicuously out of place off-duty Pegasus soldier. He was unattired, revealing a mottled brown coat which seemed so tight that it looked to be squeezing the very life from his slight frame. The smaller, though somehow more natural-looking, pony at his side was a night-guard, unremarkably identical to all others. He lay flat on the carpeted floor, his bat-like wing enveloping the brown stallion to his right.

The princess ducked back behind the archway. To Celestia's aged eye, something was distinctly off about the small night guard who was now nibbling at the obviously abashed stallion's ear. There were subtle shifts in position, flinches, demure withdrawals and forward advances. There was the way the night-guard lay on the stone floor, the splay of the forelegs, the wiggle of the hips, and a dozen other minor clues, both in body and in manner, evident to an Alicorn with tens of thousands of years of experience with examining other ponies and their behavior. It was obvious that the prickle of the concealing charm hid a female pony. The stallion beside her lifted his eyes up to the ceiling and licked his lips rapidly and repeatedly.

Celestia nickered, almost stomping her forehooves against the stone floor. Her legs and shoulders quivered. What was she to do? Scold them for neglecting their duties? No. They were young and in love, and what were guards to a Goddess? She had no need of mortals, and they burned so softly and so quickly. Embarrass them for their little tryst? In the middle of the hallway, no less. Scandalous! Whatever would the tabloids do if they got wind of such a thing? This would, of course, require merciless teasing as right and proper punishment.

From her position peering out from the shadows, Celestia saw the little brown stallion lean in to nuzzle his partner's black cheek, avoiding the spiked helm that covered her head. As the night-guard's lips formed words too soft to pick up at a distance even with Alicorn hearing, unenhanced by further magic, her eyes shone as if with soft moonlight. She pawed at him, bringing him closer to her.

Ah, yes, of course. There was really only one option, after all: leave them be. There would be time enough for adorable squirming, deliciously flushed cheeks, or protocol lessons in the morning.

Celestia turned away from the pair, shaking her head, and followed an adjacent hall. She followed. She did not choose her direction or her destination as she passed by various rooms and corridors. The stone floors and soft, clear, starlight led her. Eventually, they took her to a wing in which she no longer needed leading.

She paused before a familiar door. The wood was thick, solid, and deep brown, but littered with random patterns of imperfections and age spots. She felt, but could not see, light pouring out from beneath the door, the photons curling and dancing around her hooves by way greeting and farewell. They were too fast for nerves to detect or the physical brain to process, but she felt them and she knew them. Her lips curled as they pressed against her and then passed away reluctantly, children trying to cling to their mother. She acknowledged them, and their passing eased. Candlelight was just one of ponykind's many attempts to bring the day to the night. The Princess of the Day had always wondered how fate, or something else greater even than her, had determined to divide up authority between Equestria's monarchs. Though her sister ruled the hours of darkness, she also commanded certain kinds on light, such as that reflected by the moon or produced by the stars, but other things that burned in the night were still the servants of the day. The moon was a strange thing, though. Celestia had never understood it; she never knew how it could take what she and her sun produced and turn it into something from another kingdom, under another's dominion.

Running her dainty tongue over her lips, she raised a hoof to the door and rapped at it once. Her expression shifted back and forth, uncertain, as did she on her feet.

Finally, she whinnied, her lips flapping in a distinctly undignified fashion, something that she never would have allowed had anyone else been present, before gently testing the door with her magic. Upon her mystic inspection, she realized that it was locked tight. Again she hesitated, focusing on the rhythm of her breathing, the patterns of light on the ceiling, the half-illuminated art along the walls, and the sensation that blossomed in her mouth as she worried her lip. It was odd how many things a pony could actually focus on at once when she had millennia of practice. The stream of photons that crawled out from underneath the door began to cling at her once more while the starlight that poured in from the nearby windows beat at her back, suddenly relentless and foreign. It might have been that she had simply remembered that it was alien, and in remembering, made it so. Intensifying her hold on the door, she shifted the bolt that held it proof against intruders. Once unlocked, it yielded to her with only a creak of protest, and she entered the room.

Inside, the light grew stronger, allowing Celestia to catch sight of another pony off in the far corner of the room. The purple pony sat at her desk before a dangerously large fortress of books, her horn resting between the open pages of a single tome like an obese, conic bookmark. A small puddle of drool pooled underneath her half-open mouth.

Princess Celestia smiled as she trotted softly over to her slumbering student. Then she grinned wide and pure, and stifled a giggle, improper and rude.

"Oh, you silly little bookworm," Celestia whispered with a repressed laugh. Twilight responded with a slight snort, a precursor to a snore no doubt, and a little shake.

The princess' horn glowed as she brushed the young mare with a light telekinetic caress, enveloping her in a muted, pinkish-purple light. At the Alicorn's light touch, the small mare's aura flared to life, testing the intruding presence. Now awake, the invisible field of energy that focused in Twilight's horn and ran through the axis of her body undulated, leaped, and danced, pressing against the princess and the walls of the room, its force piercing the solid rock and reaching out in all directions, beautifully alive and somehow stifling. When seen through the eyes of an Alicorn, Twilight was not at all as she appeared physically. The presence that extended out beyond the room was larger and more imposing than that of any other unicorn that had ever lived. Even taking into account the greater intensity of an Alicorn's field, in all creation there was nothing that could quite compare to Twilight's aura. The princess waded through the soup of energy, reestablishing her hold on the young mare and casting a light sedation spell over her. Most unicorns would oppose such a spell, the alicorn reacting to, and rejecting, a foreign mystic presence purely out of a protective instinct, and the attempt at sedation would generally result in a rather unpleasant and shocking arousal. Twilight's distinct aura welcomed Celestia almost greedily, all but dragging her through the field of energy and opening itself up to her intrusive penetration and manipulation. With Twilight slumbering deeply, the snow white Alicorn raised her pupil into the air. Twilight curled her legs into her chest instinctively. Celestia paused, holding her student still in the air, staring as Twilight snuffled her muzzle into her shoulder. Then the Princess of the Dawn carried her student the few remaining feet between the desk and the bed, carefully navigating the piles and boxes of books that made traversing even that single yard a distinct threat to personal safety.

"Well, Twilight, it's been quite some time since I had to put you to bed."

The crisp red sheets of Twilight's bed crinkled as Celestia lay her student down to rest.

"All those plans and schedules, and yet you still manage to stay up past your bedtime."

The smile that hadn't left her lips since she had first laid eyes on her slumbering student faded into a frown as a shudder rocked the purple unicorn. The lines that traced her furrowed brow and splintered off into her cheeks might have highlighted age in any other pony, but on Celestia, while they washed away her air of playful youthfulness, they only accentuated her regal bearing.

Celestia scanned the room, starting with her student. There were no external signs of a nightmare, no sweat beads dotting her brow or involuntary twitches of the extremities. She was not flushed, and a simple, targeted mystic scan indicated that both Twilight's heart rate and her breathing patterns were not at all abnormal for a slumbering pony. The same could not be said for Celestia as she started, her lips curing into an involuntary snarl. A hasty general scan bathed the room in harsh purple and pierced the material veil to again reveal the various auras in the room. Her heart began to slow. Other than Twilight's field, lapping against Celestia's like waves coming in on a beach, there was no presence in the room aside from the princess.

Celestia shook her head and huffed, giving Twilight a quick once over to assure herself that her lack of thought, and the undisguised light and power of her magic, had not disturbed her student. It had been foolish, of course. No pony could have affected Twilight mystically without her realizing it immediately, and it likely would not have ended well for whomever it was who had chosen to contend with Celestia's purple pupil.

The princess craned her neck upwards, the simultaneously thick and graceful muscles along her back tensing from the movement and from the sight of another shudder running through her student. Running her eyes over the room, Celestia noted that the brickwork did not look particularly suspicious, and the soft, candlelight shadows that shifted and danced on the walls were paragons of innocence.

Coming to the windows, Celestia only just restrained herself from raising a dainty forehoof to connect with her forehead.

Even the very old, the very powerful, and the very wise could forget the little things. Perhaps they were even more prone to forgetting, Celestia reflected as she stared up at the open windows into the crisp night that lay beyond her castle walls. If her thoughts and her fears had not turned to mystic manipulation, her general scan would have revealed Twilight's lowered body temperature. Oversights like that were somewhat natural. An Alicorn could not feel cold, even when stuck in the void of space or imprisoned on an otherwise lifeless moon. Mortal ponies often forgot the little things because they simply hadn't enough time to waste appreciating them. Immortal ponies ignored them because too much time had made them simply forget. They still remembered, but it didn't matter because they couldn't remember in the moment. They had to recall.

With a figurative flick of her magic, Celestia set the windows swinging closed, this time paying enough attention to mute her horn's radiance to the level of a soft nightlight. Her attention focused on the windows, it took her a moment to realize that the waning gibbous moon lay in the sky, wholly visible from Twilight's room.

The sight turned her thoughts to her sister and the little mare that lay several feet away, hunkered down into the soft comforter of her bed. Celestia had never even thought to suggest that Luna visit the small town of Ponyville, as her sister had determined to do several months ago. Had Celestia learned of that plan, she certainly would have counseled her sister against appearing on Nightmare Night. The Princess of the Dawn had intended to spend the evening communing with her sibling, in the hope mollifying her and being on hand in case of emergency.

Nightmare Night was a celebration dedicated to remembering the monster that Luna had become, once again ignoring the princess she had been for so many years. Celiastia had approached the captain of the Night Guard regarding her sister's whereabouts, and the pony had reluctantly informed Celestia of his Mistress' plan. Fully expecting disaster, and somewhat at a loss as to what to do, a rarity for a being as experienced and level-headed as Celestia, she had simply waited for her sister to return, ready to deal with the aftermath of her almost inevitable disappointment and rejection. Sitting in Luna's chambers, slowly picking away at an immense bowl of sugar cubes intended for her sister on her return, she had done all in her power to suppress the memory of Luna's last response to rejection, rebuking herself for the thoughts of Nightmare Moon that bubbled up and burned like boiling pitch.

To her infinite surprise on Luna's return, she had learned that, after some initial friction, the residents of Ponyville had embraced Luna, equally enjoying the show she put on as her Nightmarish alter-ego and the antics of the socially awkward princess herself.

Luna had made clear her respect for the young Twilight Sparkle, who had displayed inequine amounts of patience, understanding, and perceptiveness. Celestia had later been well pleased that her sister had gushed unceasingly. The unrestrained use of the Royal Canterlot Voice had caused Luna's joy to echo through the chamber and penetrate into the halls. If Luna had stopped for a moment to allow Celestia to respond, the Princess of the Day would have been quite embarrassed to have been rendered completely speechless. Engaging with her sister as she did that night had been a rare new experience for the age-old Alicorn; never before had her sister been so bright in her presence, and never before had they been quite so close and free, even if only for a night.

Her subjects had accepted Luna, and the princess had made friends on a night dedicated to her debasement. Moreover, Celestia's young student had become a teacher. There had been a swell of personal joy at that. Twilight no longer needed to learn about friendship; she was no longer the solitary mare who longed for companionship, but found herself limited to investigating the subject as a scientist. It was no longer a matter of working to know how to make friends and keep them; she simply understood how to grow into friendships organically. That night, Twilight had proven that she understood it enough, knew it with enough intimacy, to help an outcast learn to make friends. The little bookish unicorn had taken a pony who was not unlike she herself had been only a year before, a pony who longed for friendship in her heart, and taught her more about the subject than Celestia had imparted to Twilight over the course of a decade. Both her sister and her student had surprised her that night. In a way, Twilight had taken what little Celestia had given to her, invested in her, magnified it, and faithfully returned it to her first teacher by interceding on Luna's behalf.

Princess Celestia turned away from the window and the moon to face her slumbering student. The purple mare's face was in shadow, but the moonlight reflected off of her back, causing her coat to shine with a luster that somehow, Celestia knew not how, suddenly seemed to outstrip its beauty in the day as she studied or laughed or played or simply lived.

Celestia's lips curled. "Well done, my good and faithful student."

And the purple mare shuddered in response, her coat still prickling from the night air.

Celestia had protected and nurtured all of her ponies since time immemorial. Before they had worshiped her, she had waged war against the chaos that threatened even now to overwhelm ponykind. It was only right that a goddess love all her little ones. It was only proper that she shield them from all that meant them harm.

And so she threw her hooves onto the bed, drawing herself up and wincing at the creak of bed-springs not meant to accommodate the weight of an Alicorn. It groaned and protested even as she tried to hold still. She could feel the ripples of the soft comforter against her belly, but uncomfortable shudders rocked through the wood and her flesh. The jiggle was like an echo that reverberated in her body, concentrated in her flank. Finally, the noises died down, but the bed sagged under her. She could sense the strain. Everyone was a critic. Starting tomorrow, she resolved, only two desserts. Of course, what was weight to an Alicorn? What were the laws of physics and biology that dictated mass, gravitational pull, or the storage of energy?

Her wings extended out from her body, flaring and releasing several stray feathers that floated down to rest, without sign of protest, on the bed. They were pristine; pure white on blood-red. And then she enveloped her faithful student. There was no sign of protest there either. A contented whine sounded out, and the little unicorn, a filly in compare to Celestia, scooted closer to the princess' warm and yielding barrel. At least someone appreciated her.

"Is that better, my faithful student?" Celestai whispered, tilting down so that her lips brushed by the purple mare's ear as she spoke, causing it and its twin to flick and twitch. The princess grinned broadly once again. Twilight's head lolled in response to Celestia's breath, angling to face the Alicorn directly.

The Princess of the Dawn and the Day leaned into her student, pressing her lips against Twilight's forehead just above the spiraling, purple horn. There was an intake of breath, though Celestia had no need to breathe, at the electric spark that leaped from the alicorn to the Alicorn's mouth. The princess' lips lingered there for a moment as she shut her eyes and clenched her teeth. It was not a pleasant sensation. It was too pleasant.

Pulling back, she could see that Twilight's mouth had parted again. Celestia's grin wobbled into a cheeky smirk. It was probably, the princess knew, so she could continue drooling. The Alicorn's head cocked to one side. Her ethereal mane calmed and cooled. It's thick and heavy radiance rested on her and pressed down on the purple unicorn, the outermost tendrils curling around the body beside her.

And they lay there a while, the princess and her student, the Alicorn never looking away. Then the realization came to her that Twilight's candles still burned off in their corner. Her attention drew away from Twilight as she reached out with her mind. Her enormous horn barely flickered as she extinguished the flames. Their light cried out for her not to let it go, and then it was gone. In that very moment, the starlight was hideously foreign against her back, but the body against her side was familiar.

Even as a filly, it had been clear to Celestia that Twilight was brilliant. She was so very inquisitive, a mixture of hunger and awkwardness, shyness and desire. Though full of questions, she restrained herself, Celestia knew, because she held her teacher in awe. It had taken so very much to draw out the filly. When, on occasion, the shell cracked naturally, overcome by the little mare's lust for knowledge or an excited, ecstatic reaction to the princess's praise or personal success, Celestia had experienced something forgotten, something she never could quite understand.

They had played and learned together, and the princess had allowed herself to shirk her duties. If Twilight had questions, wanted to explore those forgotten passageways that Celestia frequented, to read or be read to, Celestia would make the time for her. The princess had long ago recognized that it was something of a minor miracle, or a testament to Twilight's impressive character, that the filly had never abused Celestia's limitless capacity for indulgence.

Celestia could recall the little filly curling up between her forelegs, the book in front of them propped up by their combined magic as her mane settled around them, its light all they needed even in the dark of night. The tiny, wide-eyed Twilight would read and the princess would watch, both rapt.

She had grown up so quickly and so wonderfully. It was nothing less than a joy to behold. And yet, Celestia thought, in growing, they had grown apart. Celestia had sent her away. The Alicorn moved her head down to the bed, and felt the little mare's exhalations on her face. Their breath mingled. Again, they lay together for a while.

Shifting gloom eventually drew Celestia's fixed eyes away. The air swam. It bled black deeper than night. From the corner of the room where once Twilight's candles had burned, there stepped, without forming, the Princess of the Night. She closed on the bed, her mane and tail flicking about, their stars almost dead, and her aura flared out into the room as dull as Celestia had ever seen it.

Luna's eyes were bright and hard and cold, twin moons on a clear winter's night. Throughout her life, Celestia had seen those eyes many times before. They were first set in the original murderer. Those were the eyes of the first pony to turn on his brother and slay him, and those were the eyes of Nightmare Moon.

Luna did not snort, huff, or pout. Once she stopped before the bed, she did not flutter a single feather, and Celestia saw that she was flat and lifeless, cold and dead. She was the moon, a silent thing that only reflected, and did not produce. Therein lay the terror of the moon. It could not burn or burn out. It did not grow and consume like fire, for its destruction was malicious. It was dead. It suffocated slow and torturous. Even in its act of murder, it was inactive. And those eyes stared into her.

Celestia had confronted by them more than a thousand years ago, and she gazed into them, unflinching. If her sister's eyes were dull, than the solar princess' burned. They were sharp and condensed, concentrated like a white dwarf star that had lived, consuming itself, long before their father had lit the match of nuclear fusion that set Equestria's sun ablaze. They were alive with the magic of life. The hairs along her back rippled against the sensation inspired by Luna's stars, and though the Princess of the Day set her jaw and her lips, even she could do nothing to restrain the blinding radiance of her features. Twilight nuzzled the princess' shoulder.

And then Celestia lifted her wing from the small pony that nestled into her side, raising it to point straight up to the ceiling. There was a slight flick of the tip.

Her sister's face scrunched up. Luna recoiled as if she had been stuck a blow, her hooves clattering on the stone floor. A strange sort of paresis fell over her. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly, but her body only seemed capable of an entranced and all but imperceptible sway.

The little mare between them slept on. Her hooves twitched in slight agitation, pawing lightly at the bed sheets underneath her. A groan rumbled low in her chest, and she burrowed deeper into Celestia's side, pressing her muzzle into the soft fur of the princess' barrel. Celestia stifled a giggle at the sensation, a light, painless tickle despite the firm and sharp horn that scraped along her coat and flesh, and she looked to her sister expectantly.

The Princess of the Night leaned in towards Twilight, stars flaring, pulse following pulse in rapid succession, but her breathing was slow and even. Celestia thought for a moment that she had never seen so great and so quick a change in her sister's aspect. The smaller Alicorn raised herself up on to the bed. It did not protest. Celestia felt her sister wrap a wing around Twilight, tucking it between The Princess of the Dawn and the purple unicorn.

The snowy Alicorn lowered her wing to envelope her little sister and the littler pony between them, the white feathers blanketing both of them in a softness that was both physical and not. Together with Luna's wing, the pair all but concealed Twilight completely, wrapping her in their combined, comfortable warmth. At the angle from which they viewed the slumbering pony, the pair of Alicorns could only just make out her head, her sensibly-cut mane, complete with split ends, the soft curves of her muzzle, her flaring nostrils, and her twitching eyelids. She smelled of lavender. Celesita knew it must have been shampoo.

Hours ticked by in motionless silence, broken only by Twilight as she shifted in her sleep, grumbled occasionally, and kicked out, dreaming dreams that only she and Luna could see, and that only Luna could remember. As they lay there, both sisters found it strange that time should seem to pass so slowly. A thousand years was as a day to an Alicorn. It had always seemed so before, and it should have been now.

Finally, a deep, empty well opened up inside of Celestia, a hidden and profound sense of wrongness. It festered like a wound split open and filled with dirt, consuming her chest before rising up into her throat, dry and harsh and angry, robbing her of her unneeded breath.

As it grew, Luna felt the weight of responsibility begin to ease from her figurative and mystical shoulders. A sort of terror gripped her heart, primal and unreasonable like that of a prey animal whose throat was caught in the jaws of a predator. To the Moon Princess, every second that ticked by seemed as if it was the very moment before that predator tore through the soft flesh and spilled her lifeblood, allowing it to be driven out by a furiously pumping, fearful heart.

It was nearly time for her flee from her sister, to turn from the hunter into the hunted, and allow herself to be chased from the sky once again.

Luna inclined her head towards her sister while raising her wing to cover Twilight's slumbering face. In unison, the sisters' horns began to glow, sending out violent streams of contrasting dark purple and bright pink light. Luna's aura extended outwards, crashing against Celestia's own. Then, the two fronts of their mystic presences twisted and blurred, their unique colors merging together to the point where the transition between them became gradual and seamless. Together, their power extended outwards into the sky, finally separating back into two as it reached the edge of the atmosphere.

Luna's heart ached to the point that it felt as if it was fit to burst. The throb, the burn like spice on the tongue and acid in the throat, fell upon her without her having recognized it. There was a waver in her mystic stream. It distorted, the princesses' combined aura shifting in sudden excitement, cracking in the middle. Where moments before there had been perfect unity, a series of distinct, interlocking breaks, like the joined teeth of zipper, appeared.

Celestia's wing tightened around her sister, drawing her closer. The sleeping unicorn between them pressed into the Princess of the Night, allowing her to feel the ridges of Twilight's ribs against her side, the soft throb of the little mortal heartbeat that rocked through all three of them, and the strangely soft harshness of her dry coat of hair. The pair of Alicorns smiled together as one.

Celestia took hold of the sun, and Luna followed suit, grasping the moon in a distant yet intimate caress. Magic extended out into the entire solar system as they took hold of the three objects under their collective control. The slowly turning world on which they lay rested in their combined grip as the night began to give way to the day, even as Luna's grasp on the planet waned and her sister's power waxed. Everything rested in perfect balance. The night's hold on the world weakened and the day's hold strengthened, but at that precise moment, they turned the world together. In holding it, they held each other.

Their power faded, their horns growing dull, but together they still held the world, an infinitesimally small line of magic running through them that enveloped the world and pierced it to its core. It was motionless, on the brink.

Light poured in through the window, bathing the two sisters and the sleeping purple unicorn. The sun would rise soon, pulled up by Celestia's power, drawn forward by the retreat of Luna's night and moon, and forced into the sky by the rotation of the planet under their cyclical rule, but for the moment, the pair sat enveloped in the pre-dawn light. The sisters met just over Twilight's head, pressing their muzzles into each others' necks, huffing lightly into soft fur and then taking in the scents of the dawn and the evening. For the first time in their collective memory, at that moment, neither could feel the instinctual fear of defeat or the obsessive need to overcome in victory. Pre-dawn light hummed in their ears, pelting them like a gentle rain that soaked down deep into their coats and refreshed, leaving them cool and clean. The little Unicorn that slept between them cooed, each rise of her chest suddenly feeling sharp against their sides, and they lay down their heads next to hers. Though the light played around them, a harmony of wave and particle, a union of opposites that were one and the same, as if it knew them both, it would not respond to them. It would not obey them; neither controlled it.

Later, when Twilight awoke to the light of the risen sun, her eyes opened to the sight of two slumbering mares, clutching each other and clutching her. Their manes merged and blurred, forming a shifting rainbow of new colours seen and unseen. It seemed that they were drawn together by magnetic attraction or the gravitational pull of all the stars in the sky put together and a sun with a mass of one point nine nine times ten to the thirty kilograms. The goddesses were gracious; the sight of them was an inexplicable shock, but something was too comforting to allow her to care. Twilight closed her eyes. She could feel the harmony, hear it in the hum of the light that whispered in the back of her mind, made foggy by the pull of sleep; and what was harmony but all the Elements working together under one rule?

The sisters had come together with her, though she knew not how or why. Her books had failed and the knowledge of the goddesses themselves was insufficient, but that was enough, even if it was only enough for her. After that thought, she felt their grip tighten, and she thought no more.

* * *

Author's Notes:

It might seem strange that, among other things, I've decided to end with Celestia as our primary focalizer, but the story was intended to be about inversions of symbolic and, well, equine relationships.

I hope that you've derived some enjoyment from reading this exercise. Cheers to those who made the slog.


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